Dreams In A Time Of War by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Put simply, Dreams In A Time Of War by Ngugi wa Thiong’o is a beautiful book. But it is also challenging, engaging, shocking, endearing and enraging at the same time. It also offers truly enlightening insight into the psychology, motivation and eventual expression of a great writer. Anyone who has admired Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat will adore Dreams In A Time Of War, because the fiction that rendered the novel such a complex and rewarding read is here as reality, in all its greater rawness of immediacy, contradiction and conflict.

Dreams In A Time Of War is an autobiography, covering Ngugi’s infant and childhood memories until the day he left home, as an adolescent primary school graduate, to join Alliance High School. Thus we journey in Ngugi’s account from a homestead shared with a father, four wives and numerous siblings to the start of a Western education with its subject boundaries and prescribed canals of thinking. It would be easy to suggest that this represented a journey from the traditional to the modern, but that would be naïve. It would also miss the point.

Tradition, in Ngugi’s recollections, is extremely important, especially the magic of language. Words, clearly, were always for him much more than labels. The Kikuyu language that was his birthright offered a richness of expression and meaning - not to mention an identity - that fired his imagination from a very young age. It was also a language that was denied and derided by at least part of an education system that proselytised on behalf of the colonial, the modern. Throughout Dreams In A Time Of War we are aware of this potential for conflict, where the clearly academically gifted young Ngugi yearns to read and learn, but is regularly reminded that the only acceptable vehicle for that activity was the English language. For some who emerged through the vicious selection for entry into the educated elite, this denial of identity led to a rejection of birthright, origin and perhaps culture, so that they might more completely and convincingly adopt the new status to which they aspired. In Ngugi’s case, this demanded denial of his own background led him to appreciate it, its values and its worth more acutely. It is a mark of the book and equally the man’s complexity, however, that he not only retained an insider’s appreciation and understanding of his birthright, but also embraced the English language and education to become one of the language’s greatest writers.

Ngugi’s description of tradition is never static. At the same time, his view of modernity is never uni-dimensional. He recognises that his people’s ceremonies have changed over the years and that their significance has altered. Old men’s stories may still enthral the young, but the world described has already changed. Farmers have been driven from their land. Estates growing crops for cash and bounded by fences have been established. Factories offering wage labour have opened. Many of the structures that bound families and communities together have been transformed, perhaps not broken down, but have at least been challenged by new allegiances and aspirations.

Equally the modern is not presented as a monolith. Two different education systems coexist, one that transmits only Christianity and European values, and one that admits local language and learning. In the same way that individuals are influenced by what they are taught, they are also transformed by their experience of employment, of nurture by institutions and comradeship. In Kenya, for some this included loyalty to King and country via service in two world wars, acceptance of Christianity, responsibility to exacting employers and land owners, as well as, for others, acknowledgement of and adherence to tradition, family values and kinship transmitted by oral culture. And the reality that Ngugi portrays so beautifully in this book is that these apparently opposing poles were often mixed up within the individual, almost every individual.

If there is still anyone who retains the notion that British Imperialism was tantamount to spreading pixie dust, then such a person ought to read Ngugi’s childhood memoir. Here are descriptions of hooded informers - no doubt paid to say the right names, of indiscriminate detention, concentration camps and cold-blooded murder. And all this was backed up by a wholly unjustified and erroneous assumption of racial superiority. By the way, it’s about the same way they treated the working class back home, even down to denying most of them access to the educational goodies that legitimise social class identity.

Readers please do not be put off by the difficulties posed by the Kikuyu names and words. If they are unfamiliar, then find a way of summarising and merely recognising them. But do read this beautiful childhood memoir and thus do understand a little more of the experiences that motivate writers - and others – to explain. The view is partial, of course, that is why it is both entertaining and illuminating.

Testament Of Youth by Vera Brittain

Testament Of Youth by Vera Brittain is significantly more than an autobiography of a young woman. It presents, at least initially, a portrait of a society that nowadays appears quite foreign, takes us through a war that changed that society and rendered it obsolete and then leads us into an era that promised a new start, but which proved to be no more than a transition to the kind of modernity we now recognise. Testament Of Youth thus reads like a personalised view of history, written by an author who was conscious of change as it happened, and, indeed, was am agent in that change. Vera Brittain was also capable of appreciating the consequences that would follow.

Prior to the outbreak of World War One, Vera Brittain inhabited what were then described as the English middle classes. They bore no resemblance to what we nowadays identify with that label. These people were not merely professionally employed and propertied. They might proudly own two or three abodes here and there. They probably had servants, though they might not have referred to them as such. Private income was common, as were assumptions about education, marriage, career, deportment, manners and a host of other social trappings.

This, of course, was an era when only a small fraction of the population had any access to higher education, where women could not vote, where Britain still thought she ruled the waves. The Empire was still very much intact. Despite her commitment to feminism and her desire for independence, Vera Brittain seems, at the start of her memoir, to be heading by default straight for convention, as currently assumed by her class. But then the war came.

World War One lasted more than four years. The carnage was on a scale the world had never previously witnessed, and of an industrial type that had only recently been manufactured. Unlike modern warfare, however, the majority of the casualties were combatants, not civilian. By World War two, of course, the paradigm had changed,

World War One killed off almost a complete generation of young European men. Like many women, Vera Brittain joined up herself, feeling that she must contribute to the war effort in some direct way. But she became a nurse and her experiences caring for the wounded from the trenches form the bulk of Testament Of Youth. Her description of her work and those she nursed are vivid but balanced by detachment. She relates her experience without exaggeration, lists the horrors without once trying to shock for the sake of effect. Some of the most moving passages relate to those whose injuries were so severe they were left untreated. The stoicism with which they accepted their deaths is portrayed in its full, cold, terrifying inevitability.

At the end of the war, Vera Brittain can only be described as being in a state of shock. She had lost family and friends, and the man she would probably have married. She had nursed countless wounded, many close to death, many disfigured or jut shot to bits. By the end of 1918, it was clear that the world was not going to return to what it had been at the start of the decade. Women, of necessity, had done work previously denied them. They had the vote. A generation of young men had been interred.

And so Vera Brittain returned to university, but to study history rather than literature. Her desire to write was still there, but now she wanted to do something political or journalistic in an attempt to prevent the carnage she had seen from ever happening again. She offered support to the League Of Nations. But there remained a vast hole in her personal world, an abyss that nowadays we might diagnose as post-traumatic stress.

Eventually, she has her writing published and the possibility of marriage and a family reappeared, just when as a woman in her thirties, she had begun to assume her life would not take that route.

Testament Of Youth is a magnificent account or war, not of combat or heroism, nor indeed of comradeship or anything to do with militarism. Testament Of Youth describes consequences, both direct and indirect, and reminds us of the depths of suffering plumbed by the insanity of conflict. It deserves a wide reading today, since there seems to have emerged a tendency to portray war as mere memoir, rather than as wholesale, industrial, indiscriminate slaughter.

Waiting For Sunrise by William Boyd

In Waiting For Sunrise William Boyd returns to his very best form.  The novel’s central character is Lysander Rief, an individual every bit as intriguing as a Mountstuart or a Todd. Rief is an actor with an English father and an Austrian mother. He was brought up in England, but his German is passable and improves, and his French is not bad. He also possesses a few exclamations in Italian, we learn.

At the outset, we find him in Austria just before the outbreak of the First World War. Initially, the impending conflict does not seem to figure but, rest assured, no self-respecting novelist could let such momentous events pass without comment. The War does in fact become the principal theatre for the plot. Initially, however, Lysander Rief is visiting Vienna for purposes of consultation. He has taken time out from his professional life to seek help with a slight problem. Like so many of William Boyd’s males, situations arose when one day Lysander was caught with his trousers down. Readers of William Boyd’s novels will appreciate that his male characters are rarely backward at coming forward when trouser dropping is on the agenda. Lysander’s particular circumstances, however, offer some surprising perspectives on the practice.

Early on he meets Hettie Bull, a petite English sculptor with a common law artist partner. She has a few problems of her own, it seems, though these seem hard to pin down. He also meets a couple of relative smoothies from the British Embassy who are destined to figure significantly in subsequent events. They offer what might be described as professional assistance when needs arise. Lysander finds himself in a few pickles whose solutions depend on external input, and eventually quite a number of other challenges that originate from that initial input of assistance. His unconventional departure from Vienna leaves him in debt.

The First World War breaks out and Lysander enlists. There soon proves to have been some spice in the Viennese pickle, spice that got Lysander noticed. Assignments materialise and offers are made that cannot be refused. There is a need for special training, but even these new skills might prove no match for the challenges posed by an attractive widow in Switzerland.

Lysander needs a while to overcome the after effects of his experience Geneva. At first it seems that the case is complete, but there are more questions to be raised, questions of contacts closer to home, questions that urgently need answers. These lead to another task, an assignment that generates even more complications. And who would have thought that the libretto of a risqué opera would have caused such a stir? Surely this was no more than an illustration of Vienna’s peculiar mix of decadence and eroticism at the turn of the twentieth century. Surely? This was a city, Lysander was told, beneath which ran an incessant, fast-flowing river of sex. And which city might not?

When William Boyd is in this superb form, the plot seems to race past with surprises at every turn. But what it never does is appear in episodic form, via scenes that apparently materialise merely to move the story along. Throughout, Waiting For Sunrise is beautifully constructed and integrated, with several aspects of the action experienced, interpreted and then retold to be reinterpreted, perhaps differently, before anything comes clear – if anything ever does. The reader feel that events are really developing through the characters eyes and experience, and never feels that these people are mere cut-outs being flashed across a miniature stage.

William Boyd’s speciality must be his treatment of people like Lysander Rief, talented men whose self-assurance is significant but internally denied, whose earthy frailties, given half a chance, usually get the better of their highly developed but easily suppressed powers of reflection. Lysander Rief, when such a trousers down moment is in prospect himself reflected on this, “and noted how the promise of unlimited sensual pleasure blotted out all rational, cautious advice that he might equally have given himself.” Rief surely has fellow travellers in Mountstuart or a Todd. For Lysander, there is a fiancé called Blanche, Hettie the sculptor, a comely wench in a guesthouse, a captivatingly unattainable widow in Geneva and several dancing girls along the way, not to mention an alluring mother. The here and now always demands the total attention of such characters.

Considerations of style also separate William Boyd’s work from the mere story teller. Not only does he pepper his text with references and allusions to the historical and philosophical, he also requires the reader to change point of view. These characters inhabit the real world we, ourselves, share. They do not live in a made-up fantasy that seems to exist as a vehicle for the writer’s imaginings. And, by various devices, all of which make sense in the context of the book’s plot and revelation, we encounter Lysander Rief both from within and without, as both a first and a third person. We read about him, and we also read his own reflections on himself and the events that befall him.

Spying, espionage and intrigue during the First World War, these are at the heart of Waiting For Sunrise, and it is the plot that drives the narrative. But this plot is much more than a string of events. The only way to experience everything is in context, to join Lysander Rief on his journey of discovery. Perhaps, by the end, you will know him a little better. Perhaps.

Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

When reviewing a book as well known as Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, there is little point in wasting time describing plot and characters. So much has already been written about this masterpiece that only a broad outline is needed. Heart Of Darkness is a tale told by a seaman to his fellow crew members while their ship is anchored in the Thames Estuary.  Marlow, a veteran of the sea, relates the story of a job he once had when he was required to navigate a great river in Africa in a steamboat to find a man called Kurtz. He – and Kurtz were dealing with a company that traded in and out of Africa, darkest Africa, as it was then often called.

As ever with great literature, it is not what happens that matters. How things develop and how they are related is always the key, and Marlow, whose voice delivers almost all of the book’s narrative, is not afraid of expressing opinion or offering interpretation alongside events. So subtle is Joseph Conrad’s character, however, that the reader never feels that ideas are being hurled from the text. Throughout we are invited to share Marlow’s world and world view in the same way that those imagined listening seamen share his story. We are never cajoled or commanded. The writer never uses the character merely to pontificate.

The darkness at the heart of the book is multi-faceted. Yes, obviously, it is the dark continent that Africa represents in the received values of the time that lies at the centre of the story. Yes, the darkness also represents the dark-skinned people who inhabited the place. One thing the modern reader must be prepared for is Conrad’s use of language, especially terms that would not today be tolerated. But Conrad’s language is already more than a century old, and sometimes things change.

On the other hand, another heart of darkness for Conrad was clearly the exploitative relationships that fostered and perpetuated colonialism. At the time, such a position would have run contrary to received assumptions. It is interesting to note that this aspect of darkness at the heart is mentioned at the outset, before the story has migrated to Africa, while we are still within sight of the heart of the Empire. There is another darkness, also, at the heart of human relationships. Sometimes people need protecting from the truth, it seems. Sometimes a little lie preserves a myth whose destruction would not help anyone who accepts its truth.

What makes Heart Of Darkness a masterpiece is that its messages manage to be both universal and timeless, despite its clear foundation at the nineteenth century. They go to the heart of how human beings interact, both as individuals and as groups. They examine motive, allegiance and self-interest. They epitomise our inter-dependence, the necessity to co-operate, but they also identify and describe an equally essential need to compete, to assert individualism, to survive, sometimes at another’s expense.

At the heart of the novel, also, is the very experience of story telling. It is not just what Marlow relates to his companions that maintains our and apparently their interest: it is also how he tells the tale and how he offers interpretation of his feelings. Like Marlow himself, we are wiser for having relived the experience. And just like the unnamed listener who ostensibly wrote down Marlow’s story, we remain spellbound by every word of this masterpiece.

Anglo-Saxon Britain by Grant Allen

Anglo-Saxon Britain by Grant Allen is a book that now comes free via Amazon Kindle, so there is absolutely no excuse for not reading it, especially when such editions can be downloaded to and read from an ordinary personal computer, at zero cost and complete convenience. This is not an advertisement, except, of course, for the book.

Anglo-Saxon Britain ought to compulsory reading for all narrow-minded nationalists, Little Englanders, British national types, English leaguers and any other set of racial purity head-bangers, plus absolutely anyone who might even suggest that isolationism is either beneficial for or a natural state of the English. Anglo-Saxon Britain is not a new book, and hence does not cover any aspects of ethnology that have been developed since the arrival of DNA analysis. Anglo-Saxon Britain is thus an old-fashioned review and analysis of available historical documents and sources. But, in a succinct and wonderfully readable form, it succeeds in summarising the issue’s complexity and communicating a beautifully rounded picture of a thoroughly complicated reality.

The English - and their Saxon and Jutish cousins – were, of course, invaders, originating in what we now call Germany, Denmark and Holland. What they brought to a Romanised, at least in part already Christian and largely unified land was barbarism, paganism and continual warfare. What they also brought with them – or at least the Angels did – was their language, a form of low German with gendered nouns that had case endings and verbs that declined into multiple forms But the general structure of that language endured, endured as its complexities of form gradually disappeared whilst its complexity of potential nuance grew. Its vocabulary welcomed successive waves of foreign invaders and its aesthetic adopted the more civilised ways of other foreigners from southern Europe.

The Danes also deserve a mention, of course, since they ruled most of what we now call England for much of the Anglo-Saxon period. And the Welsh and Celts, indigenous people, but only in a relative sense, were not only subjugated but contributed in their own way to the wholly complicated and, frankly mixed up, gene pool through inter-marriage. The point is made repeatedly that perhaps the most English – as far as the original form and sound of the language is concerned – is still spoken by the Lothians of modern-day Scotland, since the Angel settlers there were the least affected by subsequent waves of invasion.

What we do know about the English – very little, it has to be said, since they wrote down almost nothing about themselves – is that they rarely cooperated, except at the tribal or clan level, constantly bickered and argued, regularly fought one another and spent very little time on more civilised pursuits. At least some things have endured.

Anglo-Saxon Britain by Grant Allen does not trade any myths. It presents a learned, well researched and referenced account of the politics, the conflicts, the culture and language of the early English. It reminds us that the last English person to occupy the English throne was Harold in 1066 and he succumbed to an immigrant from continental Europe who moved in and made the place his own, perhaps improving it along the way. The book is superbly entertaining as well as informative, erudite and learned, but also lean, stimulating and succinct. Its sections on the language, alone, render it essential reading for anyone who is the least bit interested in English or the English.

Donald Cottee's third blog

We’ve been here a couple of weeks… - Don buys Cornish pasties, relives a holiday, remembers friends and nights out in Bromaton.

We’ve been here a couple of weeks now. We are starting to settle in. I have even tried out some Spanish. There’s a shop up the road that sells English foods, so I walked up to get us a snack. I crossed the road at the zebra by the camp site entrance. Why do I call it a zebra when it’s red and white? And whatever happened to pelicans? There was a dirty great BMW coming straight down the middle of the road at twenty ks. I thought I’d stand aside and let my social better go first, but, fucus me, the guy stopped! I nearly dropped through the floor. As I walked across, I offered a display of gratitude. I turned to face the driver and mouthed a very clear, Hylda Baker-style lip mime of “Gracias”, making sure to stress, silently, the “th” in the middle. “Thome Thpaniards thay s,” said my phrase book. “Grathias,” I mimed. The driver was clearly taken aback. “Danke schön. Ich bin Schweiss,” he said through the open window. At least that’s what I thought he said, but it could just have been, “Du bist scheiss,” but I don’t think so.

Further up on the left there’s a bar. We used to go there regularly when we came here on holiday. It was the karaoke that we went for. There’s nothing like a good sing-along. I remember the whole place striking up to a few old favourites. There was one year when there were about twenty of us, all from Kiddington, who had arranged to come over the same fortnight. We used to get together and sing every evening. It was just like being back home in the Working Men’s Club. It was a great sight to see everyone singing Country Roads because we all knew the words. I can hear it now. “Take me home - To the place I love - To the place I know - West Virginia …” It was marvellous. One spoilsport stood up and left, saying that Kiddington was in West Yorkshire, not West Virginia, the archeopteryx. I wonder now if he had a point.

We got to know all the waiters really well. They used to greet us by name when we arrived for our evening drink. “Hola, Mr Don” or “Hola, Don Don” they used to say. One of them was a bit of a joker and for him it became “Hola, Don Burro” because we had told him about my nickname. He sometimes called me “Pedo viejo aburrido[1]”, but I never did get the hang of that. Perhaps he was suggesting we ought to pay.

I called in this morning to see if there was anyone I knew, but the place has clearly changed hands. It’s been done out as an American theme bar. It’s not American and has no theme, just black walls, ultraviolet lights, a few mirrors and Heavy Metal to ring the ears. The new owner was sweeping up last night’s fag ends so I said, “Buenos días. Soy Don Burro. Bebo aquí.”

He looked confused. “Shoukhran,” he said. “Je suis de Maroc. You want internet?” I wish I understood - not to mention a Muslim bar owner... I left.

The Brit food place was just a bit further down the road. I always thought that L147, Modern European Languages, Their Development, Structure, Grammar And Context, would stand me in good stead in the era of pan-European integration, and now, in my new life, I have the opportunity to put my learned skills into action. Inside the shop I pointed in my best Spanish at the display and said, proudly, “Dos Cornish Pasty Sabor Pollo Tikka Massala Tradicional, por favor.”

I was initially gratified when the assistant did precisely what I asked. He then paused, my paper bag lunch suspended delicately between his sausage-like middle finger and thumb, the fingers of his left hand anticipating the microwave door release button. “D’yer wan ‘em warm, mate?” he asked in broadest Scouse.

“No,” I replied, keeping my Spanish accent.

It was only just after eleven so I decided to take a nostalgic detour. The pasties, after all, were for lunch, so I had at least an hour. I carried on towards the sea. It’s not too busy at the moment, probably because the schools aren’t on holiday yet, so all the travelling teachers are still at work.

As I walked past Benidorm Palace, I couldn’t help recalling the first time Suzie and I went there. It was quite soon after it opened, about thirty years ago. It’s changed a lot since then, but only on the outside. The show is probably the same. You can bank on lots of colour, well known songs, a plate-sized steak and a good night out with bare breasts, though men have to wear ties. It reminds me a lot of the famous Variety Club in Bromaton. It was built in the sixties next to Bromaton Quartet football ground. It opened in a blaze of highly selective celebrity glory with a jazz week. It was the era, of course, when BBC2 used to run live jazz prime time in the evenings, not because it was popular but because it was a fulfilment of a public service to an identifiable minority taste. Quaint, wasn’t it? We covered the development of the idea in S282 Post-War Public Service Broadcasting Ideals In Western European Democracies, contrasting it with the headlong pursuit of the lowest common denominator that emerged during the seventies and eighties. The history of the Variety Club anticipated the change. After its opening jazz, it concentrated on Sunday Night at the Palladium acts, the brand of variety that could sing or comic a star turn on television, relying heavily on names well known for their endorsement of cat food, carpets, car insurance or yogurt. I retract the last in the list because we had never heard of yogurt at the time.

It did well for a few years. Suzie and I used to go there regularly, as did a number of people from Kiddington. It was only a few miles away and it was on the bus route to Bromaton. People would save up so they could go out for a night of class every few weeks. While Reg with his organ used to fill in the gaps between the bingo in the Working Men’s Club, we used to sit with friends and compare lists of the star turns we had seen at the Variety Club. They did a special night on Sundays, with the acts, prawn cocktail, chicken in a basket and apple pie with custard for a fiver. In those days, of course, a fiver was a fiver. It was a tidy sum, a hundred shillings, or even one thousand two hundred pence in an era when a Penny Arrow actually cost a penny, before, that is, it got so small they had to change its name, because it had become too short to be called an arrow. But you didn’t get to eat your Penny Arrow watching Dickie Henderson, Vince Hill or Daisy May which is why the Variety Club cost a fiver. I can even remember speculating with my dad what kind of car each star might drive. We had to wait two hours by the stage door until Dickie Henderson came out. It was an Aston Martin. Class act.

But it was that holiday in 1981, the year of our first trip to Benidorm Palace, when Mick Watson reappeared in our lives yet again. I should rephrase that because he had already reappeared in Suzie’s life at least once per night that week. It was in one of those sophisticated cubicles that Suzie leaned across to shout in my ear, “I’m not going home.” Though the music was loud, Pete Crawshaw and his missus, Paula, both heard, though they did their best to convince us that they were still listening to the turn who was blasting out My Way at volume, with all the sincerity of a Sinatra. We had booked the table at the start of the week, some days before we had all stopped speaking to one another. I still think it was all Dulcie’s fault. She has always been a rebel, always tried to manipulate. She had started the minute we left home. She told me one thing, and then asked Suzie for the opposite. Thus we argued while she retreated to childhood’s safe ground to watch. We’d only reached the Tuesday when I left a Benidorm club early to take a sulking daughter back to the hotel, leaving Suzie at the mercy of a certain Mick Watson, whom we knew had taken over bar management in the establishment.

By then, of course, we had already been here on holiday several times. We knew the ropes; we knew the clubs and the bars. We had also come across Mick Watson in a different role, as the manager of The Dog’s on Calle Lepanto. But the place was changing fast in a way that Kiddington was not. And by 1981, he had moved on from his little shop-front pub in the Europa Centre and had become a bar manager in a club. His star seemed to be on the rise. Perhaps that’s why Suzie wanted to stay. Perhaps, on the other hand, it was that fulgurant[2] Mick Watson’s smooth talk. For a second time, he promised her the earth. It was twenty years since our first visit to beautiful Benidorm, a place we had always associated with easy-going sophistication. And then, that evening, it became a black hole of despair for one Donkey Cottee, an end to life with the stunning Suzie. It had been so different that first time, back in the sixties.

They were years of change. We were convinced we had achieved a level of sophistication unknown in human history. We had mass media, record players, the Beatles, television soaps, cars and Cyril Lord carpets. We had even started to put green peppers into salads. We had already been abroad on holiday, and had our minds broadened enough for people like Suzie, my dearest wife, to wear a poncho as an everyday garment. It was, of course, a relationship of convenience, begun during our very first visit to Benidorm’s golden sands courtesy of Suzie’s parents, near the start of that swinging decade.

We were still scratting for a living even at the end of the sixties, mind you. Suzie and I were all right because I had a trade, or at least the start of one. But many of those who had been branded secondary and modern left school at fifteen with neither paper in hand nor knowledge in head. Pete Crawshaw was one such product of post-war British educational enlightenment. He had already worked through a handful of bit jobs when he landed a waiter’s job at the Variety Club, a position he thought would be a good earner. If people paid a fiver for their Variety Club chicken in a basket, what might the tips be?

We were still on good terms, despite having gone our separated educational ways at eleven. Pete had been a labourer for me for a few months after he got the boot from Empire Metals, where he had been packing brass right angles into wholesale-trade plain cardboard boxes. So when he got the waiter’s job at the Bromaton Variety Club, we had a few pints of Tetley’s to celebrate. I can remember saying, “Thanks for the pint, Pete. It’s the first time I have known your wallet come out without its padlock.”

“It’s all changed now, Don,” he said. And we both bolted half a pint in the next gulp. We said little else.

It took only a few weeks for the story to change. He invited me out again. This time, as usual, I paid.

“I’ve had a run in at work,” he said. I can remember his gloom. There was a white foam line of ale head across his upper lip. I remember thinking his face looked as long as Charlie Carolie’s.

“I’ll get my pointed hat and saxophone,” I said, pointing politely at my own mouth.

“I’m serious,” he said, wiping away the fast popping bubbles with the back of his free hand. “I don’t think it can last. It’s a matter of principle.”

“Pete, I’m that surprised I have precisely one hair standing on end,” I thought. “So what’s gone off?” I asked, intentionally referring specifically to the Variety Club’s food.

“Trouble at t’mill,” he said.

“Sprocket’s dropped off t’mainbrace, then?”

“Aye, summat like that…”

I was willing him to be more forthcoming, but I took my time. I knew Pete had some of the characteristics of my own granddad, to whom he was distantly related by marriage. The old chap could make a ten minute speech with eight words. And Pete, like many Kiddington lads, measured his emotional intensity in pints. It was three later that the floodgates opened.

“The boss has got it in for me.”

“What have you done, lad?”

“It was a prawn cocktail. I took it back to the kitchen.”

“My God! For whatever reason?”

“There were no prawns in it.”

I remember contemplating the scenario. Here’s a punter that’s paid a good, sweat-earned fiver for a night out to see Harry Secombe. The plumbeous proplasm[3] of supporting acts is currently playing to chattering indifference. And so, no doubt doing their utmost to ignore the palmyric phenomenology of the material, they tuck into their five quid’s worth of locally up-market menu, specialities by resident chef Gordon Bloo. With mouths slobbering at the anticipation of chicken in a basket, the perfunctory starter, the prawn cocktail, arrives. Pete Crawshaw, the proud, employed waiter, himself slobbering at the promise of tips, delivers the pink and green concoction, as it streaks its way down the inside of a wine glass, a glass that will look completely out of place next to the pint jars on the table. A minute later, the unsuspecting Pete is called back.

“’Ere, there’s no deleterious prawns in this endocrine cocktail. It’s just a few strips of stentorian lettuce and a spoon of frangible pink sauce!”[4]

“So I took them back to the kitchen,” said Pete after another deep swig of Tetley’s had gone part way to alleviating his obvious despair. “That’s when the boss went for me. ‘Don’t neo-platonically tell me that there’s no deleterious prawns in the endocrine prawn cocktails, you leukopotomous squirt! It’s the meretricious new house rules now! The owners say they can’t nomothetically afford any more deleterious prawns. The parsimonious place is losing money! And you are paid to serve the detritus, not comment on its flaming validity! Now take the pre-Cambrian things back and tell the artichokes what I’ve said. Tell ‘em to eat what they’re blunging given!’” Pete took another swig of Tetley’s to lubricate his vocal chords. The last time he spoke so long at one go was probably saying the Lord’s Prayer in primary school assembly. “It’s not going to last, Don.”

And then, more than a decade after our advice session in the pub, there we were in 1981, communally experiencing the new international tourist attraction, the Benidorm Palace, an imitation surely not of the Moulin Rouge or Folies Bergère, but of Bromaton Variety Club and its celebrity prawnless prawn cocktails. We were having a holiday together. But Dulcie had been a pain in the tintinnabulation all week, moaning about the food, saying she was bored, getting the runs and then sulking in her room. Suzie had spent more time with Mick Watson than with me, despite the fact that we didn’t even run into him in his new bar at the Rincon end until the Tuesday afternoon. We had fallen out with Pete and Paula, because they wanted to do things together and the Cottees couldn’t be assembled. And, to put the Dutch cap on opportunity, Suzie announces that she is not going home. I had made things up with Pete and Paula by the end of the following week. With Suzie it took longer. If only Suzie and I had turned around out of shoat creek as quickly. As I passed The Palace this morning, drifting, I began to hum ‘Memories are made of this.’

---

[1] Boring elderly flatulence – ed.

[2] Implying flashy - ed

[3] Lead casting - ed

[4] Hard and tough and harmful to the body - ed

The Quality Of Mercy by Barry Unsworth

At first sight, The Quality Of Mercy by Barry Unsworth might appear to be a sequel. Sacred Hunger, the novel that won the author the Booker Prize, is a vast and highly moving tale about the slave trade. The Quality Of Mercy continues some of the loose ends that Sacred Hunger left, but it goes far beyond being a mere adjunct to its larger predecessor. The Quality Of Mercy makes its own points, just as significant as those of Sacred Hunger, but its form is more succinct and, in some ways, its message is more telling.

As ever with Barry Unsworth, the novel goes far beyond mere story, describes much more than the countable events that befall its characters. In Sacred Hunger, the focus was a mercantilist venture in the inhumane human trade of the eighteenth century. It was the history, its veracity, its credibility, its rawness and ultimately unacceptable reality that shone through and rendered the book a completely satisfying experience both as a narrative and as an intellectual experience.

In The Quality Of Mercy, Barry Unsworth continues the tale of the Liverpool Merchant, the ship that made Sacred Hunger’s voyage in the triangular trade. But it is more than a decade since the endeavour came to its unfortunate end and Erasmus Kemp, son of the venture capitalist whose dreams of profit proved no more substantial than a pending insurance claim, is pursuing an action against a gang of mutineers from the ship who still languish in a London jail. He is also pursuing the insurance claim, the outcome of which depends in part on how the crewmen’s mutiny is seen.

The Ashtons are brother and sister and, for their own reasons, support the abolition of slavery. One of the hand-clapping surprises of reading Barry Unsworth is his ability to interpret the history associated with his plots. There is no mere plod through events as they unfold. Neither is there cheap sensationalism derived from overstatement. What Barry Unsworth achieves is a rounded picture of issues that incorporates the complications, contexts and nuances of a debate that are often lost in summary accounts. And he always manages to achieve this with elegance, wit and considerable beauty. Abolitionists, you see, were not all liberals campaigning for human rights and concepts of freedom. Politics have always been more complex than that. Read the book to understand the nuances.

Well, the Ashtons oppose Kemp, at least the brother does. The sister, Jane, eventually makes liaisons of her own with Erasmus Kemp. His anticipation of willing enslavement by her prompts the delamation of some rather uncharacteristic promises of the kind that men are prone to make when presented with opportunity.

There is the case of Evans, who in theory has been manumitted and thus rendered a free man, but whose former owners still regard as their property to sell. There is Sullivan, an Irish fiddler from the Liverpool Merchant, who breaks out of prison to fulfil a promise to a deceased crew member that he would contact his family to tell of his fate. That family lives in Durham and work in the mines, work in a domestic slavery from the age of seven, the dark underground galleys of the mine reminding us directly of the below deck cargo hold of the ocean-going slaver. Then there is the mine’s owner, a landowner and a Lord, no less, who lives in a state of permanent debt, more interested in trinkets than lives. And then there is the dawn of capitalism in the form of the nouveau-riche Kemp’s intended purchase and reform of the Lord’s mines, a proposal characterised by notions of technological innovation, increased efficiency and projected profit. A little piece of previously unwanted land might hold all kinds of keys.

The Quality Of Mercy is thus much more than an historical novel. It is also much more than a tale of slavery and emerging capitalism. It is more than mutiny aboard ship and revenge via the Law. It is also much more than an essay o social class relations at the start of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. It is no less than a Barry Unsworth novel and therefore simultaneously emotional and intellectual, a rounded and completely satisfying experience for the reader. But it is a complex book about complex issues. Expect to be challenged.