Tuesday 31 October 2006

LISTEN WITH MUMMY

Since it is HALLOWEEN and supposing you are staying in tonight -- and, after all, it might be wise -- with, of course, the doors locked, the windows secured and the curtains tightly drawn, then you might, perhaps, enjoy a little story...

So I'd like to offer you a diversion - merely in order to take your mind off any disturbing thoughts of things that might - just posibly - go
BUMP! or BOO! in the night...

Several years ago now, I wrote a radio play entitled The Next in Line and it is, I think, exactly the kind of story for a night like tonight...

This innocent and diverting tale is based on a short story by my friend Ray Bradbury collected in his 1947 book
Dark Carnival. My dramatisation was originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 (as part of a series called Fear on Four) on 31 December 1992, but this story was not originally set at the turning of the year, but in another season entirely and in a place where Halloween goes by another name: El Dia de los Muertos --- The Day of the Dead...

This tale first seized my fevered imagination when I came across a book entitled The Mummies of Guanajuato, containing Ray's story and a suite of deeply disturbing photographs by Archie Lieberman. The book, now long out of print, presents the combined response of two creative artists - one a fictional flight of fancy, the other a documentary record - to the Museo de las Momias in Guanajuato, Mexico.

Many stories are told about Guanajuato and its mummies...

There are accounts of the ferocious cholera plague that swept through the surrounding countryside in 1833 necessitating vast numbers of burials...

And there is talk of the tradition - so alien to our thinking, but so natural and matter-of-fact in a devoutly Catholic country where death is not the end but a beginning - of exhuming and cremating bodies after five years of burial - in order to make room in the good earth for those who have yet to die...


More alarming, perhaps, is the chilling knowledge that it was possible - for those who had relatives with money - to financially secure a
permanent final resting place on an annually renewable basis amounting to "Pay up or you're dug up!"

The real melancholic fascination with the deceased of Guanajuato is that over a hundred of the bodies exhumed five years after the cholera epidemic were found to have been naturally mummified - a fact which led to the uncorrupted dead being exhibited for the freakish astonishment of the paying public from 1870 until the present day...


That, briefly, is the background to Ray's story and my play and - if you are quite sure your nerves are up to it - you can listen to
The Next in Line, right here...

...and (click - if you dare!)
NOW!

[May 2007 - The availability of this recording has now been disabled]


There are many websites with information - both factual and faulty - about las Momias including (among the better ones) Mexico: The Dark Side and Don Quijote, while Catholic writer, Ann Ball, offers a spiritual contemplation on viewing the dead of Guanajuato in her article Powerful Memento Mori.

And, if you listened through to the end of my little play for Halloween, you can read more about the production of The Next in Line at Phil Nichols' Bradbury Media to whose site I am especially grateful for the link to the download of my play!

Visit Window Gazing and buttons' blog for more Halloween images...

Monday 30 October 2006

MILDLY SCARY PICTURE

If it were not for the fact that tomorrow is Halloween when we are all game for a little spookiness, I'd have some trepidation in sharing this recent - and frankly unnerving - encounter in a dentist's waiting room...


Honestly! The things these teeth-tweakers will do to try and take your mind off an extraction!

Sunday 29 October 2006

GIVE A LITTLE WHISTLE

Today: Another interesting sign for your enlightenment! Jen Miller encountered the following notice at Ardrossan Station for the ferry to Arran...


Not forgetting, of course, to---

"...ALWAYS let your conscience be your guide!"


[Images: Jen Miller & Walt Disney]

Saturday 28 October 2006

HELL’S BELLES!

It cost us more money than, at the time, we could really afford, but we both knew that we wanted it and we have never regretted buying it.

The chance to buy one of Ronald Searle’s original ‘St Trinian’s’ cartoons -- caption: “Who’s there?” -- was, for David and I, an opportunity to own something by a great comic artist whose work we both admired...

That was several years ago now, but I look at it every day with renewed delight and with admiration for the artist's superb draughtsmanship.

Now, however, comes the somewhat startling news from St Trinian's (an establishment most of us thought had been closed down or probably blown up!) of the imminent return to the cinema screen of those terrorizers of the British education system.

The witty series of occasional cartoons by Ronald Searle began in the pages of Lilliput in 1941 and proliferating over the next two decades - with an increasing maturity and sophistication of line enhancing a darkly diabolic sensibility that was present from the outset…

Collections of the cartoons began to be published in 1948 with Hurrah for St Trinian’s! And the first (and best) of five feature films, The Belles of St Trinian’s was released in 1954 with Alistair Sim dragged -up and in gloriously funny form as the school’s beleaguered headmistress, Miss Millicent Fritton, and with a superb supporting cast including George Cole, Joyce Grenfell, Hermione Baddeley, Joan Sims, Beryl Reid, Irene Handl and Sim in a second role as Clarence Fritton, Miss F’s feckless bookie brother.

The remake will, according to The Independent, star Rupert Everett as the Frittons siblings and rumour (via The Sunday Express) has it that the gym-slipped demons will be led by Keira Knightley as Head Girl and with Billie Piper, Denise Van Outen and Kylie Minogue possibly brandishing hockey sticks.

According to Mr Everett, the original vision for the cartoons - a mix of innocence and worldliness - is to be “sexed up”. In fact, St Trinian’s new prospective Headmistress is reported as saying:

"I wanted to make the schoolgirls into drug-dealers and prostitutes and what have you. Others disagreed. But in the end it was decided that my way is how it will be."

Allegedly, the new intake of pupils will also be seen indulging in a little "slap'n'tickle" behind the bike sheds rather than the murder and mayhem of their predecessors.

Hmmm… Now doesn’t that sound like a brilliant idea? Not!

Anyway, purists for whom the prospect of Mr Everett in twin-set and pearls chasing Ms Knightley and crew around with a swishy cane is less than enticing, currently have a chance to savour the original wicked wit of Ronald Searle at an exhibition at Chris Beetles Gallery in London.

The works on show (now at prices we really can't afford!) range widely across Searle’s formidable output much of it characterised by the sharp, spiky, scratchy, spindly style that was uniquely his own and which made his reputation.

Included, naturally, are various instances of appalling behaviour by those surly Searly-girls - such as this enthusiastic young zoologist…


“Elspeth! Put that back at once!”



There are a number of pictures from Searle’s advertising portfolio including examples of his long-running 1950’s campaign for Lemon Hart Rum, featuring the angular, yellow-suited connoisseur and his roly-poly friend with a preference for Lamb’s Navy Rum…

There are also examples of the artist’s eagle-eyed theatrical caricatures, several of his later, biting, social satires against corporate America - from computer giants to the moneyed mice of Disneyland - and his consistently telling observations of universal human failings and foibles.

Among the many gems are his illustrations for The Illustrated Winespeak (1983) with its deft depictions of such overblown wine-list phrases as...




“Not a lot of depth but has substance”

Without question, Searle is not simply one of the greatest cartoonists of the post-war era, but also one of its greatest illustrators whose decorations have captured the spirit of such diverse writers as Patrick Campbell, James Thurber and Charles Dickens’ for whom he brilliantly embellished both Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol


And it is, indeed, a book that provided the inspiration for this particular exhibition (and a third of the exhibits) because the 86-year-old Searle has just illustrated Jeffrey Archer’s Cat O’Nine Tails and Other Stories (Macmillan £25) with a suite of 49 full-colour images - plus a purrrfect cover featuring one of Searle incomparably smug felines with the appropriate number of appendages!

“I’m incredibly honoured to have Searle illustrate my book,” Archer told me at the exhibition’s private view the other night, as well he might be! And the rest of us should feel honoured to be able to still enjoy the work of such an unflaggingly brilliant artist…


“A massive heart attack trying to move a statue in the garden…”

The exhibition continues at Chris Beetles gallery until 11 November (where signed copies of Jeffrey Archer’s book are available); and fans of Ronald Searle might care to stop by the blogspot of animator Matt Jones who has created a ‘Ronald Searle Tribute’ here on Blogger in celebration of the girls of St Trinian’s and so much more…

Friday 27 October 2006

SHARP & PAINFUL

Prompted by my shot of the lads from Screwfast dashing off in answer to another emergency call-out, Jen Miller has sent me this photo of another sharp operator whom she spotted in Glasgow and who presumably sometimes goes by the name of Macheath!


Meanwhile, in South West London we seem to have a window-cleaner with a similarly punning sense of humour.


One can only hope that they're as good at their jobs as they are at word-play...

[Images: © Jen Miller & David Weeks, 2006]

Thursday 26 October 2006

LIFE & TIMES

BREAKING NEWS!


The ‘Screen’ section of today’s London edition of The Times newspaper features an intriguing extract from my shortly-to-be-published authorised biography, Peter Jackson: A Film-maker's Journey.

Under the headline 'We've got to kill a hobbit. You pick one', the extract describes a bizarre early meeting in the Hollywood offices of Miramax at which Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh attempted to discuss the making of The Lord of the Rings with Bob and Harvey Weinstein. You can be read it here at Timesonline.

Wednesday 25 October 2006

A TREE FOR HALLOWEEN

Yesterday's blog recommending Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree not only prompted various comments from my regular readers it also stirred the leaf-mould of my own memories...

It was twenty-six years ago, in 1980, after six years of corresponding with Ray Bradbury, that we met for the very first time when I interviewed him at the London offices of his publishers.

The book which I took with me on that occasion to ask him to inscribe was the first UK edition of The Halloween Tree...


Six years later, we met for lunch in a restaurant on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles and waiting for me under the napkin by my plate was an American edition of the book with an inscription and a golden Halloween Tree drawing by the author, studded with grinning pumpkin lantern stickers!


No wonder this book has always been special to me...

That lunchtime gift was given twenty years back and yesterday came another gift from Ray Bradbury: an e-mail response to my blog, recounting a short history of how the Halloween Tree came to be planted and how it grew and put forth its unique autumnal fruits...

Here, with Ray's permission, is that story...

The Halloween Tree came about because I had lunch with [legendary Bugs Bunny animator] Chuck Jones forty years ago; he had just become a new friend.

The night before, an animated [Peanuts] film - The Great Pumpkin - had been on TV. My children disliked it so much that they ran over and kicked the TV set, along with me, because the whole idea of the Great Pumpkin supposedly arriving and then not arriving was incorrect to me. It was like shooting Santa Claus on the way down the chimney!

Chuck Jones and I agreed that we didn't like The Great Pumpkin, though we did admire Charlie Schultz, the cartoonist, very much. Then Chuck said, "Why don't we do a really good film on Halloween?" I said, "I think we could. Let me go home and bring something."

So I went home and brought Chuck a large painting of a Halloween Tree that I had painted down in the basement with my daughters a few years before.


Chuck took one look at it and said, "My God, that's the genealogy of the holiday. Will you write a screenplay on this?" I said, "Yes, hire me!" So Chuck Jones and MGM hired me to write a TV script called The Halloween Tree.

Several months down the road, MGM decided to turn its back on animation, so they closed their unit and fired Chuck and me. I had nothing to do then so I took the script and wrote the novel of The Halloween Tree.

Later I wrote a second script for the final animated film, which was done by Hannah-Barbera a few years later, for which I received an Emmy Award for the script.

About three years ago I produced Something Wicked This Way Comes at a theater in Santa Monica and on Halloween night my biographer, Sam Weller, drove me to the play and then home again at around 10:30 at night and on the way, in four different yards we saw that people had placed pumpkins, real ones or papier mache, lit with candles in trees in their front yards.

Now, there are Halloween Trees beginning to appear all over the United States and I realized that with my story and that picture that I painted down in the basement with my daughters more than forty years ago, I've changed the history of Halloween in the entire country.

I've discussed this with the Disney people and suggested that they invite me to Disneyland on Halloween night and put up a tree full of papier mache pumpkins and have me there to turn on the whole thing. They would make themselves and me part of the future history of Halloween because no trees existed forty years ago -- they began to appear only after my book and my film.

The Disney people haven't reacted so far because, I believe, the notice is very short. If we don't do it this year I'm hoping that Disney will invite me out next Halloween and initiate the birth of the Halloween Tree and the history of the holiday.

It's been an interesting experience for me and it thrills me to think that 100 years from now there will be Halloween trees all across our world...

Thanks for reminding me about all this...


And thank you, Ray...


[Images: The cartoon of Ray Bradbury is by myself and accompanied my first interview with him in 1980; the autumnal Tree was painted by Ray in c. 1960, the green Tree, some years later and both are featured in a superb limited edition of the book from Gauntlet Press; the mask is one of Joe Mugnaini's decorations to the 1972 edition of The Halloween Tree.]

Tuesday 24 October 2006

A TREAT FOR TRICKSTERS

There’s still a week to go to Halloween, but grimacing skeletons and gap-toothed pumpkin-heads are already everywhere…

In only a few years, Halloween in this country has gone from being a totally American and utterly un-British (and therefore inexplicable) holiday to being up there in the UK marketing and merchandising league with Christmas, Easter and Valentine’s Day.

There was a time when the only glimpse those of us on this side of the Atlantic ever got of the trick-or-treat world of Halloween was in Charles Schulz’ annual Peanuts strips in which Linus vainly waited in the pumpkin patch for the arrival of his own mythical invention, the Great Pumpkin!


Though our stores are full of Halloween paraphernalia, there is precious little cultural knowledge in Britain about the Catholic feasts of All Hallows (or All Saints) and All Souls celebrated on the 1st and 2nd of November or of the European traditions, superstitions and amusements that preceded them on the 31st October known as All Hallows’ Eve or Hallowe'en…

Those who would like to understand more about the origins and multi-faceted accretions that comprise the dark festival of the turning year can, obviously, look them up in on-line or on-shelf encyclopaedias...

But, if you'll take my advice, you'll, instead, hitch a ride with the mysterious Mr Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud in The Halloween Tree, an autumnal conjuring trick by literary magician Ray Bradbury with haunting tombstone black-and-white illustrations by Joe Mugnaini.

The cadaverous Moundshroud leads a group of youngsters on a frantic time-travelling jaunt through the “deep dark long wild history of Halloween,” beginning within the shadow of the Halloween Tree…
The pumpkins on the Tree were not mere pumpkins. Each had a face sliced in it. Each face was different. Every eye was a stranger eye. Every nose was a weirder nose. Every mouth smiled hideously in some new way.

There must have been a thousand pumpkins on this tree, hung high and on every branch. A thousand smiles. A thousand grimaces. And twice-times-a thousand glares and winks and blinks and leerings of fresh-cut eyes…


By wing and kite and broomstick they fly on the winds of lost centuries from the darkness of the cave before the discovery of fire, and the rituals of Druid England with its scythe-wielding October God of the Dead, to the gargoyle-encrusted towers of Notre Dame; from the bone-and-mummy-dust tombs of Ancient Egypt through the Grecian Isles to the City of Rome and away to South America and the candles and sugar skeletons of El Dia de los Muertos, The Day of the Dead...

It is a journey that memorably explains how light and darkness, faith and fear have shaped a festival more wildly celebrated, perhaps, than understood…

So, maybe when the little terrors come around knocking our knockers today week, we should slip a copy of Mr Bradbury's classic into their Trick or Treat bags - then they might know why they were doing what they were doing and, if nothing else, at least it wouldn't rot their teeth!

For more information about Ray Bradbury and his books, read my blogs on Ex Libris; my profile of him on Gateway Monthly; and many pages of information on the excellent Bradbury Media.



[Images: Peanuts © 1971 United Features Syndicate, Inc; illustrations to The Halloween Tree by Joe Mugnaini, © 1972 Alfred A Knopf, New York]

Monday 23 October 2006

WHAM! BAM!

...THANK YOU, VAN!

Sunday 22 October 2006

THE SLOTH WHO REFUSED TO BE RUSHED

There was once a Sloth whom, everyone said, lived up to his name. He was, as the term ‘sloth’ suggests, idle, indolent and inactive, lazy, languid, listless and lethargic. Despite being permanently surrounded by animals that were concerned - day in and day out - with hustle and haste, the Sloth remained resolutely indifferent, even apathetic.

The other creatures had no time or sympathy for the Sloth’s slothfulness.

“Hurry up!” the Cheetah would yell every morning as he rushed by in a blur of whisker and tail. “You’ll miss everything that’s going on!”

“Where were you?” the Cheetah would laugh as he sped back at the end of each day. “You’ve no idea how many thrills and diversions you passed up on today!”

The Sloth never bothered to think of a reply because he knew the Cheetah would be gone before he could begin.

He sometimes wondered - briefly - what it was that the Cheetah and so many of the other animals found to do that was so essentially thrilling and diverting. He assumed it involved a lot of rushing and tearing about and no doubt a good deal of bounding and leaping as well.

No one stopped long enough to ask the Sloth how he passed each boring day or what he did to fill each monotonous hour.

Had they done so, the Sloth would eventually have replied:

“I really haven’t done anything of importance… I woke early and hung from a branch pondering the way in which the early morning sun danced on the dew-sparkled grass.

“I took an hour selecting the single most luscious bunch of berries on my favourite berry-bush and then spent another hour savouring each juicy mouthful…

“I watched a spider tirelessly weaving a web of gossamer fineness and a butterfly struggle free from its chrysalis, dry its wings and fly off into the forest…

“After a light lunch of another bunch of berries, I looked on as a platoon of ants transported a leaf that was one hundred times larger than themselves and a tiny bird peck its way out of the blind-dark prison of its shell…

“Following supper, I watched the hummingbird hover in mid-air and suck the nectar of the hibiscus flower and at sunset I gazed at the sky as it turned first gold, then crimson and, finally, took on the blue-black shades of the star-pocked night…”

And such, I regret to tell you, was the shamefully unfulfilled existence of the Sloth who refused to be rushed.


© Brian Sibley 2006
Read more of my Likely Stories.

Saturday 21 October 2006

THE PRODIGAL RETURNS

It is, I imagine, rather like when one of your kids leaves home… Tears as they promise to ring every week and not to get into trouble and then the sudden feeling of loss when they drive off with all their possessions and you close the door and walk back into an empty-feeling house…

Well that’s sort of what it felt like in July 2005, when I sent off the final chapter of the authorised biography, Peter Jackson: A Film-makers Journey, to my publishers…

I thought Master P J Book would be home in time for Christmas - we'd talked of going to the London premiere of King Kong together; but December came and I waited in specially, but there was no sign of him…

Then, no word for months on end. But now - well over a year later - I hear that P J Book is on his way home, at last…

He's not here yet because first of all he's got to stop off in New Zealand to go to some sort of "do" that's being thrown for him... A well-meaning friend (who knows how much I missed P J Book when he went away) suggested I should enter a competition in the daily newspaper The Dominion Post and maybe win myself a ticket to the party...

While I was debating that suggestion, someone sent me an invitation - well, an e-mail attachment of an invite - but in the end I thought, "No! Supposing I accept: I'd have to buy myself an air-ticket, pack a suitcase and cope with a twelve-hour flight to the other side of the world. Besides, do I really want to meet young P J Book when he's being interviewed in a crowded theatre and being distracted by all those admiring fans? No, no... We go back way too far to want to share the moment of our reunion in such a public way..."

So I decided to wait here...

But it won't be long now... One morning, there'll be a knocking of the knocker and a ringing of the bell and P J Book will be there on the doorstep, all wide-eyed and smiling - eager to come in, hoping to be admired, desperate to be loved…

So, will we embrace?

Will I let him show me all the photographs that have been added to his 600 now-properly-printed pages? Will I say how frightfully grown up and sophisticated he looks in his fancy new DJ (dust jacket)?

Probably....

After all, parents really are terribly forgiving…

Friday 20 October 2006

THE CAT’S WHISKERS

I really wish I had a garden! And if I did have, then I’d require certain essentials such as a sundial, a nice clump of lavender, a tit-box (we had one when I was child but it was never occupied) and assorted beds bursting with country cottage type blooms - hollyhocks, foxgloves, lupins and such like - of the kind I remember seeing clustered around a little thatched house with lattice windows on a particularly devilish (5000-piece) jigsaw I once had and more or less finished --- except for the blue sky bit on the top right which was too boring to be bothered with…

Anyway, I digress…

I would - in the event of having a garden - also want a POND and, with it, what the gift catalogues from the House of Bath and other mail-order emporia are pleased to call a “water feature”. What’s more, I’ve seen just the one I want...

I very desperately desire this totally fantastical cat fountain --- with running water whiskers!


It's the work of my brilliantly gifted chum, Martin Cheek, who - when he’s not making cat fountains - is creating stunning mosaic images such as this golden tiger….


…this gold-crested crane…


…and a myriad other birds, beasts and glorious eccentricities, many of which can be viewed on Martin’s website.

Thinking back to my recent blog about the Cheshire Cat from Wonderland (I do seem to blog a lot about cats for someone who's allergic to them!), I can’t help thinking what fun it would be to have a Cheshire Cat Fountain with just the head --- the body having already vanished away of course --- suspended above a tree branch with whiskers cascading down onto the upturned face of the tirelessly inquisitive Alice?

Technically, it would probably be a tall order and, anyway, I don't have a pond - or a garden - but if and when I do...

Meanwhile, there's always 'Ginger'...

Thursday 19 October 2006

THE SQUIRREL PROBLEM...

What are they supposed to do with their empties?

Wednesday 18 October 2006

HYDE AND SEEK

Amongst the paraphernalia of Halloween currently proliferating in our shops - in addition to witches’ hats, devils’ pitchforks, vampire fangs and warty hag noses - are a whole range of masks that take their inspiration from the horror folk of literature: Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Creature, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: all of whom represent far more than the mere fear engendered by the genuinely terrifying and ruthlessly violent aspects of their various sagas.

Each of these characters is a symbol of some facet of the fears and phobias that assail the human imagination such as death and deformity and - in the case of those experimental doctors, Frankenstein and Jekyll - the potential threat of technology and science…

The warring psyches of Jekyll and Hyde as described by Robert Louis Stevenson, have never lost their fascination in the 120 years since the story was first published.

It has been the subject of many films and television versions and a number of illustrators have attempted to capture the terror of Henry Jekyll’s struggles to control his murderous alter ego. An artist who succeeded with dramatic brilliance was Mervyn Peake, the subject of my recent blog, Peake District, and a fascinating new book Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art.

Peake illustrated Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for the Folio Society in 1948 with a suite of drawings that demonstrate that the artist clearly understood the need to resist the temptation to merely draw the monster that was the flip-side of the man.

So, whilst he depicted the haunted Dr Henry Jekyll (above right) when it came to Mr Hyde, Peake chose only to hint at the horror, depicting him as scuttling off down alleyways (top left) dwarfed by the city he terrorizes yet, at the same time, casting a towering shadow; or - as shown in the book’s frontispiece - pausing beneath the guttering gas-lamp, the only indication of disease being the hunched shoulders and the unkempt demeanour.


Peake’s economy of design and simplicity of line - almost Japanese in style - and his use of a disturbingly sickly-yellow wash is inspired as can be seen in the illustration of Hyde before the mirror (itself almost animal in form) considering his shrunken frame draped in Jekyll’s too-large clothing….

Or, again, in a cunningly contrived drawing of Hyde slumped on a park bench in which the full grotesqueness of his brutish depravity still remains hidden from us but is noted by the upright Victorian gentleman who gives a disturbed backward glance as he passes by with his wife and child…


And so, when Mervyn Peake finally reveals Hyde to us in his bestial form - the simian features, the crab-clawed hand clutching the fateful, upraised phial - the effect is all the more terrible for our having waited for the revelation…


[All images: © The Mervyn Peake Estate]

Tuesday 17 October 2006

FINE FOUR-FENDERED FRIENDS

We've currently got several visiting cars parked on our street, including this rather surprised-looking Mini who, to my mind, shows a bit too much grille when she grins...


And this decidedly mean and sharky-looking Peugeot whom I wouldn't trust an inch!


Honestly, I really don't mind them being there --- just so long as I don't start hearing them talking to one another!

Monday 16 October 2006

TIME FOR SOME MELLOW FRUITFULNESS

It’s official and it's in the papers, so there's no denying it... We in the UK have, apparently, just enjoyed the longest, hottest summer EVER! Well, at least since 1659, although David, not unreasoanbly, questions how good their thermometers were then - or, indeed, their eyesight...

Anyway, the phenomenal summer must, surely, now be as good as over because - despite the newspaper pictures of people sunbathing in Kew Gardens - down river at Kennington there's every indication that autumn is most certainly a-comin’ in…

The Horse-chestnut trees are throwing down their conkers: their knobbled shells bursting open and spilling out their fruit - briefly gleaming with an oily, chocolate-mahogany sheen all too soon dulled by the scars of conker-fights*…


The leaves, too, are beginning to turn and fall - their summer greenness draining to yellow, or spotted with palsied brown, or burnt with scarlet and indigo flames…


Meanwhile, as the autumnal-coloured crops are harvested - pumpkin, marrow, beetroot - full of the earthy fatness of the fast-fading summer, there is already a damp, musty smell hanging in the air: the sleepy scent of death and decay that heralds days of mist, frost and snow, when naked tree branches will claw and scratch at leaden skies…


* For those dwelling in other territories to whom 'conker' is an unfamilar word, all that you could want or need to know - indeed, possibly more - will be found here on Wikipedia; after reading which, if you think you might want to challenge my 'sixer' then name your date and state the stakes!

For a further hint of autumn, see my blog, Window Gazing.

***

And whilst I'm rattling on about the onset of autumn, David Weeks is already ahead of us all and - with a little help from Lambeth Council - is already blogging about a seasonal holiday to come!

Sunday 15 October 2006

REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN

The usual busy Saturday traffic roared relentlessly past on Kennington Road, while in the adjacent park, people browsed the weekend papers over brunch and joggers jogged, children played and dogs chased balls…

But for a large group of local residents, yesterday was an opportunity - amongst the bustle and the busyness - to stop and remember a small, but devastating, moment in local history: the night on which a German bombing raid scored a direct hit on Kennington Park and on the trench air-raid shelter that lay just a few feet beneath the grass…

It was forty days since the Luftwaffe had launched what was to prove 57 nights of consecutive raids on London and whilst the targets were the docks, warehouse, factories and rail lines, civilian losses and casualties were high with 30,000 Londoners killed and a further 50,000 injured…

Sixty-six years ago, today - on October 15th 1940, at 22.05 hours - the Air-Raid Precautions post received the first news that a 50lb bomb had fallen on the Kennington Park trenches.

For reasons of security and morale, the event went largely unreported in the media and no official death toll was ever announced. It is now known, however, that forty-eight bodies were recovered - victims ranging in age from three-months to seventy-four years - while total fatalities are thought to have numbered at least 104 people, the remains of many lying still buried where they died, beneath the grass where current residents of Kennington play football, picnic and sunbathe…

But, yesterday, the forgotten victims were remembered when the Mayor of Lambeth unveiled a standing stone memorial.


Organised by Friends of Kennington Park, the memorial is made of Caithness stone and decorated with an elegantly crafted calligraphic inscription by local sculptor, Richard Kindersley.

In addition to the factual dedication - “To commemorate the wartime suffering of the people of Kennington and in particular over 50 men, women and children who were killed on 15th October 1940, when a bomb destroyed an air-raid shelter near this spot. Rest in peace” - the stone’s central section carries a quotation from the American poet, author and historian, Maya Angelou…

History, despite its wrenching pain,
cannot be unlived,
but, if faced with courage,
need not be lived again


...words that are a timely reminder that humankind has still so very much to learn; for, whilst bombs may no longer be falling on Kennington - on any other part of London, or wherever you are when you read this blog - they are falling in many other places in our world and the toll of civilian deaths through war rises, unchecked and often uncounted, with every day that dawns…

***

Post Script: See also David Weeks' video blog-post The Quirkiness of Folk.