No longer a Facade

[Full video available on YouTube courtesy Vanessa Dixon]


TURN BUT A STONE AND START A WING

O world invisible, we view thee,

O world intangible, we touch thee,

O world unknowable, we know thee,

Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,

The eagle plunge to find the air--

That we ask of the stars in motion

If they have rumor of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,

And our benumbed conceiving soars!--

The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
 
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places--

Turn but a stone and start a wing!

'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangèd faces,

That miss the many-splendored thing.

[From Thompson's 'In No Strange Land']

EH-UP OOPS!

The Lancashire Poet Francis Thompson was born in 1859 in Preston but his family moved to Ashton-Under-Lyne during his childhood. They lived at 226 Stamford Street [until recently described as ‘still standing and marked by a Blue Plaque].

Withdrawn, odd and dreamy, he was ill-equipped for life, becoming the recurrent target of animosity and rejection. He failed to complete his training as a Catholic Priest, spent six years studying medicine at Manchester University and was rejected by Oxford University for his character rather than his intellect. During his spell as a medical student he spent his time at the museum, at Old Trafford watching the cricket, or simply in the library reading.

Gravitating to London, he eventually became a homeless and destitute opium addict sleeping under the Thames bridges.

Eventually though his poetry was ‘discovered’ after he pushed an untidily written poem under the door of the editor of the magazine ‘Merry England’. For the next twenty years he was the subject of recurrent attempts at character reclamation, with his benefactors including literary cognoscenti and a kindly prostitute.

All help failed and he died in 1907, a pale and haunted figure who had built up a litany of sentimental, bitter and ornate poetry.

Quite how he would have reacted to the collapse of his family home in Ashton-under-Lyne is an interesting conjecture.

Asked to examine the abandoned building in the light of recent falls of bricks, a council contractor on a cherry-picker was examining the facade and poking at the brickwork when the whole shemozzle collapsed.

“He was up there trying to make it safe and he obviously took out the wrong brick. The whole lot came down with a loud rumble,” an eyewitness told The Manchester Evening News.
 

 

'McPigmet' to Get the Bird in Dundee

HOLLYWOOD MEETS HOLYROOD

News that Hollywood A-List Hollywood Celebrities ‘Kermit’ and Miss Piggy, have hopped and trottered into the Scottish Independence Debate, with a ‘Non’ny-No and a ‘Moi’, has re-opened one of Tinsel Town’s longest running family feuds. Scion of the clan, Pigmet, the star of Angry Birds, has raised his dirk in a no fingers - no thumbs salute to show his displeasure at the views of his parents.

Readers will remember that Pigmet became especially estranged from his mother ‘Miss’ Piggy over a ‘Who Do You think You Are’ exposé that uncovered her less than illustrious ancestry:

‘According to her promotional literature Pigmet’s mother was born 'Piggy' [Pigathia = River of Passion] Lee, the daughter of Danish immigrants to Iowa [family name formerly Landrace, tracing ancestry to King Sweyn III].

But:

‘Following a visit to Pork Farms, Iowa, where he trawled through the records, Pigmet was able to establish that his mother’s embellishments of her family bloodline could not be supported. It seems that she had been telling porkies.

‘Rather, the evidence confirms that she was the illegitimate daughter of Polk County town drunk Oval T. Spamroll and trailer-trash, anyone’s dumpling, Evangeline O’Peccary. However, tracing these lines back further, Pigmet is able to prove that Oval was a direct descendant of Civil War General Oddball T. Spamroll and that his grandmother’s father ‘Bristly’ O’Peccary was in fact consumed at the behest of Sam-I-Am, by a member of the notorious Cat in the Hat Gang’.

In the light of this, and his Republican and Scottish sympathies, Pigmet was reportedly enraged to learn that his mother has set her sights on either replacing Queen Elizabeth as the monarch of the United Kingdom or becoming the Queen of his beloved Scotland.

Further work by genealogists has confirmed that, like his hero ‘The King’ Elvis Presley, Pigmet shares Scottish as well as Anuran ancestry. It seems that Oddball T. Spamroll was the direct descendant of Oisin Tavish Spamroll of that Flitch, the ancient Clan Chieftain of the McPorkadales of Stye of which the Spamrolls are a sept.

Apparently Pigmet has now committed to a demonstration of levitating in a show of national solidarity with micro-gravity manipulating Yes-Yin Alex Salmond.

As both the McPorkadales and the Spamrolls share the motto: ‘Null ornis tutus in undis est’ [No Bird is safe in the Breeze] and a mutual clan animosity still burns with the Birds, it appears that the British taxpayer will be making an outlay for special security when Pigmet attends the forthcoming Hop set for 4^th July at the Dundee Trades Hall and Hog Mart.

Worryingly, Pigmet seems unaware that the Salmonds and the Birds share a long history of clan affinity; collaborative rieving and thieving; bushy and tooth-brush eye brows; and pathological antipathy towards the McPorkadales and the Spamrolls

FOR MORE SEE:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/kermit-the-frog-is-against-scottish-independence-9212988.html

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2012/05/who-do-you-think-you-are-pigmet.html

The Original Aussie Sheila

 

MEETING DIGGER SMITH

I was fascinated to read about Sheila Chisholm [1895 - 1969] in recent reviews of Robert Wainwright’s book 'Sheila: The Australian Beauty who bewitched British Society'. The story immediately put me in mind of the ‘Duchess’ who is encountered by Digger Smith, the ANZAC soldier, when he is on leave in England during WW1. I feel certain that the ‘Mrs Chicolo Legend’ influenced C.J. Dennis in writing his poem – and that there is a strong possibility that 'Sheila' gave her name to the Typical Aussie Girl.

Let's start with the poem.

A Digger’s Tale by C.J. Dennis (1918)

"My oath!" the Duchess sez. "You'd not ixpect

Sich things as that. Yeh don't mean kangaroos?

Go hon!" she sez, or words to that effect --

(It's 'ard to imitate the speech they use)

I tells 'er, 'Straight; I drives 'em four-in-'and

'Ome in my land.'

"You 'ear a lot," sez little Digger Smith,

"About 'ow English swells is so stand-off.

Don't yeh believe it; it's a silly myth.

I've been reel cobbers with the British toff

While I'm on leaf; for Blighty likes our crowd,

An' done us proud.

"Us Aussies was the goods in London town

When I was there. If they jist twigged your 'at

The Dooks would ask yeh could yeh keep one down,

An' Earls would 'ang out 'Welcome' on the mat,

An' sling yeh invites to their stately 'alls

For fancy balls.

"This Duchess -- I ain't quite sure uv 'er rank;

She might 'ave been a Peeress. I dunno.

I meets 'er 'usband first. 'E owns a bank,

I 'eard, an' 'arf a dozen mints or so.

A dinkum toff. 'E sez, 'Come 'ome with me

An' 'ave some tea.'

"That's 'ow I met this Duchess Wot's-'er-name --

Or Countess -- never mind 'er moniker;

I ain't no 'and at this 'ere title game --

An' right away, I was reel pals with 'er.

'Now, tell me all about yer 'ome,' sez she,

An' smiles at me.

"That knocks me out. I know it ain't no good

Paintin' word-picters uv the things I done

Out 'ome 'ere, barrackin' for Collin'wood,

Or puntin' on the flat at Flemin'ton.

I know this Baroness uv Wot-yeh-call

Wants somethin' tall.

"I thinks reel 'ard; an' then I lets it go.

I tell 'er, out at Richmond, on me Run --

A little place uv ten square mile or so --

I'm breedin' boomerangs; which is reel fun,

When I ain't troubled by the wild Jonops

That eats me crops.

"I talks about the wondrous Boshter Bird

That builds 'er nest up in the Cobber Tree,

An' 'atches out 'er young on May the third,

Stric' to the minute, jist at 'arf past three.

'Er eyes get big. She sez, 'Can it be true?'

'Er eyes was blue.

"An' then I speaks uv sport, an' tells 'er 'ow

In 'untin' our wild Wowsers we imploy

Large packs uv Barrackers, an' 'ow their row

Wakes echoes in the forests uv Fitzroy,

Where lurks the deadly Shicker Snake 'oo's breath

Is certain death.

"I'm goin' on to talk of kangaroos,

An' 'ow I used to drive 'em four-in-'and.

'Wot?' sez the Marchioness. 'Them things in zoos

That 'ops about? I've seen then in the Strand

In double 'arness; but I ain't seen four.

Tell me some more.'

I baulks a bit at that; an' she sez, '"Well,

There ain't no cause at all for you to feel

Modest about the things you 'ave to tell;

An' wot you says wonderfully reel.

Your talk" - an' 'ere I seen 'er eyelids flick --

"Makes me 'omesick".

"I reckerlect," she sez -- "Now let me see --

In Gippsland, long ago, when I was young,

I 'ad a little pet Corroboree,"

(I sits up in me chair like I was stung.)

'On it's 'ind legs,' she sez, 'it used to stand.

Fed from me 'and."

"Uv cours, I threw me alley in right there.

This Princess was a dinkum Aussie girl.

I can't do nothin' else but sit an' stare,

Thinkin' so rapid that me 'air roots curl.

But 'er? She sez, "I ain't 'eard talk so good

Since my childhood.

"'I wish," sez she, "I could be back again

Beneath the wattle an' that great blue sky.

It's like a breath uv 'ome to meet you men.

You've done reel well," she sez. "Don't you be shy.

When yer in Blighty once again," sez she,

"Come an' see me."

"I don't see 'er no more; 'cos I stopped one.

But, 'fore I sails, I gits a billy doo

Which sez, "Give my love to the dear ole Sun,

An' take an exile's blessin' 'ome with you.

An' if you 'ave some boomerangs to spare,

Save me a pair.
 

 

A THOROUGHLY BAD LOT

The Thursday 28^thSeptember 1916 edition of Tasmania’s ‘North Western Advocate and the Emu Bay Times’ issued the following notice:

‘Lord Loughborough’s Affairs – Money Lenders Warned

Lord Rosslyn has issued a warning that owing to money lenders tempting his son (Lord Loughborough) to borrow money, he will not be responsible for his son's debts. Lord Loughborough married an Australian lady at Cairo in December, 1915’.

This was a bit rich because ‘Loughie’s dad, James Francis Harry St. Clair-Erskine, 5th Earl of Rosslyn, had once lost £15,000 betting on his horse Buccaneer to win the Manchester Cup; was the Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo [and went back to lose all his winnings]; and an out and out scoundrel who went through a fortune in properties, an estate, and collieries only to be declared bankrupt and lose everything, including his magnificent steam yacht and the family silver, gold and silver plate which was sold at a three-day auction in Edinburgh.

But like father, like son.

Francis Edward Scudamore St. Clair-Erskine, Lord Loughborough [b. 16 November 1892, d. 4 August 1929] was both ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ and ‘brave, crazy and foolhardy’.

As Robert Wainwright explains in his new book ‘Sheila: The Australian Beauty who bewitched British Society’ [seehttp://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=858], Lord Loughborough—"Loughie", pronounced Luffy, to his friends—was twenty-three years old in May 1915 when he found himself invalided from the Dardanelles Campaign with a bullet wound in the shoulder to a make-shift hospital at Mena near Cairo.

‘Tall, rakishly handsome and affable, so far he had found it difficult finding a place in society beyond his birthright, let alone meeting the demands of the military. He had been in Rhodesia when the war broke out, but joined up within a month of returning to London in the autumn of 1914. On application, he had been assigned to the obscure new armoured car division of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.

‘Loughie had been dressed in his army uniform when he appeared in a court in January 1915 accused of writing a bad cheque. According to the charge, he had, in April 1913, signed a cheque for £200 to cover a gambling debt. Not only had the cheque not been honoured, but it had been post-dated to November to cover the fact that Lord Loughborough had not yet come of age’.

The matter took a long time to come to court because Loughie had fled to Rhodesia. Clearly the war was a life-saver in his case.

The Rosslyns were the descendants of the Norman Sinclair, or St Clair family (also anciently spelt Sanctclare which had held a castle at Roslin in Scotland since 1280.

MRS CHICOLO

Margaret "Sheila" Mackellar Chisholm was born on 9 September 1895 at Woollahra, Sydney, youngest of the three children of native-born parents Harry Chisholm, grazier of Wollogorang, Breadalbane, and his wife Margaret, née Mackellar. Sheila was educated at home. She was variously described as of excellent deportment with a beautiful complexion and a good dancer. She was also praised as ‘calm, lovely, gentle, restful and perfect', and with a classic, oval face, dark brown eyes and auburn hair, her 'smile was like that of a Lely court beauty'.

Her grandfather John Chisholm had been in born in 1820 very modest circumstances in a cottage in George Street, Sydney. Over the years he became a very successful and wealthy grazier – a tribute to his energy and frugal habits. Around 1854 he purchased Wollogorang, fourteen miles from Goulburn in New South Wales. Here he went in for breeding pure-bred cattle, and was one of the first to import shorthorns from England.

John’s youngest son Harry took over Wollogorang when the old man retired back to Sydney. The eldest son, John, had been found dead on 1st April, 1887, having fallen from his horse soon after leaving home that morning.

In 1914, Harry’s wife Margaret [‘Ag’] and his daughter ‘Sheila’ left Australia for a visit to England, where following the outbreak of WW1, they decided to try, as far as they could, to assist Sheila’s brother John who was serving with the Australian Imperial Force. John was in Egypt prior to the Gallipoli landings, and Sheila and her mother enrolled as nurses at the Mena Hospital.

As Robert Wainwright describes:

"Jack", a lean, 6-foot-tall man with the ingrained deep tan of a grazier, cut a commanding figure and was assigned to the 6th Australian Light Horse Regiment and given the rank of sub-lieutenant. The regiment was part of the 2nd Australian Light Horse Brigade, which would be based at Maadi on the outskirts of Cairo where they would wait for orders.

'No one was prepared for the reality of war, as an Australian government report prepared in the aftermath recorded:

'The weather was beautiful, and anyone might have been easily lulled into a sense of false security. In April however, a trainload of sick arrived. Its contents were not known until it arrived at the Heliopolis siding. The patients had come from Lemnos and numbered over 200 sick. On the following day, however, without notice or warning of any description, wounded began to arrive in appalling numbers. In the first 10 days of the conflict, 16,000 wounded men were brought in to Egypt.

'Sheila was a witness to the horror: "The news was appalling, like a nightmare. About 500 wounded were expected but 10,000 arrived."

'A casino was taken over, then a sporting club, a factory, three more luxury hotels, even Prince Ibrahim Khalim's palace. By the second week of May 1915, the initial plans for one hospital of 520 beds had grown into eleven hospitals housing 10,600 beds, most of which were now being made of palm wood. By the end of August, the wounded and sick would number more than 200,000, handled by a daily staff of fewer than 400.

'The crisis was not merely because of a lack of space and facilities but also a lack of staff; many nurses began to break under the strain. Reinforcements were on their way, but there was a desperate need for civilian help. Margaret and Sheila Chisholm were among a number of Australian women who volunteered to stay on and help.

'Margaret, or "Ag" as Sheila began calling her mother in gentle mockery of Margaret one day declaring: "Goodness, I am becoming an old hag," had been working for the Blue Cross taking care of injured horses. She and Sheila also helped establish the Australian Comforts Fund, which provided basic items, such as blankets and socks, for the soldiers at the front; they spent hours each day going from one hospital to another, visiting men they didn't know, listening to their stories and providing reassurance. Against protests from officialdom, they even provided free cigarettes to convalescing soldiers, rather than force the men to spend their wage of 5 shillings a day on the tobacco they needed to take their minds off the pain and horror.

Sheila then worked alongside her mother tending the wounded and dying, much to Ag's annoyance who thought her daughter, aged nineteen, too young and delicate ("how it bored me to be thought too young", Sheila would later recall). The young woman, who a few months before had been dressed expensively while attending parties almost nightly and mingling with the upper echelons of London society, was now clad in the practical garb of a hospital volunteer.

'But she did not remain unnoticed, particularly when she accidentally destroyed several thermometers by leaving them for too long in boiling water and was relegated to cleaning duties for a period. She would always cringe at any reminder of that particular mistake.

'Two decades later, at a reunion of nurses in Adelaide, her contributions would be remembered. Miss Sinclair Wood, principal matron of the Army Nurses Reserve, who was in Egypt when the first wounded came back from Gallipoli would recall:

"There were five of us at Mena Hospital, and one night we got word that 248 men were coming. We set to and made up beds, prepared wards, and waited. The men had been in the ship for a week and no one knows what they had gone through. When we got the opportunity to snatch two hours’ sleep some of the Red Cross women, among them Sheila Chisholm, who was one of the loveliest girls I ever saw, came over, rolled up their sleeves and it was wonderful what they did".

 'A Sunday Times gossip column in early May 1915 described her as one of "four beautiful Australian girls to be seen in Cairo quite recently". It seemed she could not be mentioned without a comment about her beauty.

'Margaret and Sheila had other roles outside the hospital, including organising the delivery of Australian and English newspapers so the men could feel as though they were still a part of the world outside the war. There were even moments of levity in the bleakness of the dusty city. The cable sent to Australia by Margaret to begin an appeal for newspapers mangled her surname, which appeared as "Mrs Chicolo".

'Not only did papers arrive in their thousands but more than a hundred letters came addressed to Mrs Chicolo, thanking a "foreigner" for her kindness. "Some of the epistles are written in French and Italian, and others from people I know," she told The Sydney Morning Herald.

FALLING FOR AN AUSSIE NURSE

Picking up the story again from Robert Wainwright:

‘It was here at Mena, convalescing, that Francis Erskine's life changed for the better when an Australian soldier was given the bed next to him. Jack Chisholm and Francis Edward Scudamore St Clair-Erskine—two elder sons of landed gentry from opposite sides of the world—found themselves in the same wartime hospital, and they would soon share another common bond.

---

‘Sheila met Loughie one day when she came to visit her brother in hospital. It was love at first sight, according to a later report in the Singleton Argus, which described Loughie as a "youthful warrior". He was instantly smitten by Sheila’s dark beauty and frontier-like attitude and quickly made a play for her attention. She was at first distracted—just another admirer—but fell for his cultured English charm when he sat up with her all night nursing a sick stray dog she had adopted and called Treacle.

‘She recorded the romance in her memoir: "Loughie came to tea the next day. He was tall and slim, with thick brown hair and hazel eyes. He was witty and most attractive. I soon began enjoying his company. We read the Brownings. He pursued me relentlessly and I was flattered by his attention. He told me that he had fallen in love with me at first sight. He constantly said: 'I love you and you are going to marry me, you will like England and all my friends will adore you.'

"He was persistent. He said: 'I know I am wild, but with your love I will be different. I could do great things.' I believed him and I was fascinated by him. We seemed so happy together. I thought this must be love."

 ‘Margaret counselled her daughter against marriage—she was too young and her beau, as witty and charming as he was, had a reputation for being too wild. Her father, Chissie, would not approve.

‘But amid the Armageddon the warnings fell on deaf ears, as she later remembered thinking: "Too young, too young, wait six months, wait a year, wait while he goes back and probably gets killed. He loves me so much and I love him. He is sweet to me and fond of animals; can't we be engaged? I suppose Loughie was spoiled and perhaps not very reliable but he had a great attraction and such a wonderful sense of humour, and he always made me laugh."

‘Loughie returned to the Gallipoli peninsula, his shoulder mended, but remained only a few weeks before being injured again, this time "slight and entirely his own fault", according to his colonel who described him as "brave, crazy and foolhardy". He returned to Cairo where he soon proposed.

 ‘Their engagement was announced on July 20 in the Daily Mirror, which praised the young peer. The rush to the altar received the blessing of Loughborough's father, the Earl of Rosslyn, of whom the paper commented: "The Earl himself is, of course, one of our most versatile peers. He has been a good soldier, a fair actor, a talented editor and a very brisk war correspondent. He has made at least one speech in the House of Lords. Verily, a peer of many interests!"

 ‘On December 27, 1915, at St Mary's Church in Cairo, Lord Loughborough married Sheila Chisholm, a union described by the News of the World as one of the most interesting weddings of the war because of the match between an Australian commoner and a British peer, adding: "Like most Australian women she is a superb horsewoman and excels as a vocalist."

 ‘Another newspaper columnist noted: "It is refreshing to hear that an Australian girl, after a pretty little war romance, has married into the peerage. With some of Britain's lordlings it has been a not too infrequent habit either to marry a charmer off the music halls or else wed an American heiress. Now it appears they are marrying on the keep-it-in-the-Empire principle—at least Lord Loughborough has set a new and patriotic fashion in that direction."

Not surprisingly, the marriage was a disaster - though Sheila went on to an extraordinary life as a society belle, royal mistress and 1920's 'Flapper'. She was buried at Rosslyn Chapel.

 

 

Hannah Arendt

JUST SIT

Last night was the night that my wife’s Book Club convened at our house. In my bright, bouncy and typically boundary-less manner, I made an offer to help entertain our guests. I gave my wife the choice of a) readings from my Blog, b) a talk on family history research, or c) a brief demonstration of male pole-dancing.

I detected some reluctance from her and when I then threatened to flounce off on my own for the evening there were visible signs of relief on her part.

This turned out well for me because I went to see the film about Hannah Arendt.

I’ll give Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review here to set the scene:

‘There is something perhaps a little stagey and mannered in Margarethe von Trotta's film about Hannah Arendt and her experiences in the early 1960s writing her iconic report on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. At times, in fact, it seems like a radio play with pictures. But for all that, this is an interesting film about ideas, and how explosive they can be.

‘Arendt, played by Barbara Sukowa, is shown being commissioned by the New Yorker to write about the trial. The result was her celebrated coinage "the banality of evil": her epiphany in realising that Eichmann was not a scary monster but a pathetic little pen-pusher. For Arendt, it was in this shabby and insidious mediocrity – emblematic of a nation of administrators obediently carrying out the Holocaust – that true evil resided.

‘But for many in Jewish circles, this was too sophisticated by half: her remarks on perceived Jewish collaboration in the Warsaw ghetto were resented and her association with the philosopher and Nazi associate Martin Heidegger was not forgotten. (Perhaps the nearest dispute in our day was Gitta Sereny's apparent leniency on the subject of Albert Speer.) This is a formal and pedagogic production, but worthwhile nonetheless’.

Bradshaw seems to touch on damning with faint praise an extraordinary attempt to translate the rich complexities of philosophy and the human condition into entertainment. I thought it was brilliant

It casts a bright light on some of the topics that I try to sketch in this Blog, relating to the nature of thought and the importance of moral disobedience. I have never termed the Blog 'Buddhist' but I would guess that anyone who has tried to follow the Path will recognize an occasional marker, through my longstanding interest in the relationships between words, our internal dialogues and action - and the necessity of being 'awake'.

[For some of the more obvious examples see:

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2009/11/roshi-john-daido-loori-14th-june-1931.html

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2014/01/avoiding-carthaginian-faith.html

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2012/02/lessons-from-cheshire-farmhouse-for.html

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2013/11/cryptic-crossword-espionage-and-new.html

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2013/11/coffee-with-martin-and-peter.html]

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/buddhist-economics-revisited.html

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/buddhist-economics-revisited-ii.html

Anyhow, the clash between the Yang of Love [which includes empathy] and the Yin of Ignorance [which includes bureaucratic banality] is a marvellous topic for meditation, thought and action, as my rough-and-ready header maps out. And if you want some brain teasers try 'passionate thought' and 'radical evil'.

For more on the film and the ideas that it presents, see the two clips below – in particular, the wonderful lecture / question time held by Richard J. Bernstein at the New School in New York.
 

)

)

 

Summer 2014

 

 

 

 

 

Doris Lessing's 'England versus England': A Review

PASSING ANOTHER MARKER

When Doris Lessing died recently, I had to take stock. I had suddenly passed another of the significant milestones in my life. This kind of overtaking becomes ever more common as one ages – so that you look back to a receding procession of roadside memorials that thickens towards the spot where you stand. This is your own particular set of significance dominoes that stand never more than one length apart – and that is ready to zip as a whole when your own tile falls in its place.

At the behest of one of my girlfriends in the 1970s, I read The Golden Notebook – or rather I read bits of it. It seemed to me to be strangely devoid of physical vitality, being composed of a series of literary almost ‘still-life’ impressions. Having said that, it became part of my world view, challenging me with the difficulty that surrounds trying to catch our various and shifting mental lives.

And I now have a clearer picture of Lessing as someone who was struggling with deep-seated emotional problems and someone who, at the same time, was an utterly dedicated writer. For all her professed claims on the rights of promiscuity and sexual hedonism, I have the feeling that she would have made an indifferent lover.  My assessment is that as soon as the sheets had gone quiet, she would have lent against the bed-head, lit a cigarette, and started musing on the next chunk of unwritten text [and whether or not or how her most recent experience could be portrayed].

To me, her writing has something of the character of a pot thrown by a potter or a piece of furniture crafted by a cabinet-maker. Experience for her is a dollop of clay to be moulded or a length of timber to be shaped. She uses what’s at hand and, with superb craftsmanship, fashions something that stands – an object of literary beauty and function. But I still do not feel her passions.

So I wanted to re-read some of her work after she died and I bought her ‘Stories’, with the especial purpose of studying her short story ‘England versus England’ in more detail, as it has a good deal to say about a topic that has some very personal resonances for me.

Her first collection of short stories A Man and Two Women was published in October 1963. It contained ‘England versus England’ where, as a contemporary review comments, a social concern is identified, ’as a boy from the poverty of a mining town pays a high price for upward mobility and his learning at Oxford.’

Lessing states the social problem by quoting from an imaginary document:

‘A Report into the Increased Incidence of Breakdown among Undergraduates:

... Young men from working-class and lower middle-class families on scholarships are particularly vulnerable. For them, the gaining of a degree is obviously crucial. In addition, they are under the continuous strain of adapting themselves to middle-class mores that are foreign to them. They are victims of a clash of standards, a clash of cultures, divided loyalties'.

For 'above everything else, Charlie was made to feel, every time he came home, that these people, his people, were serious; while he and the people with whom he would now spend his life (if he passed the examination) were not serious', though he did not accept that himself.

I first caught the train from Crewe to Bletchley - and onward to Cambridge - in October 1962, after winning an Exhibition Scholarship to St Catherine’s College, leaving behind a struggling lower-middle class farming family who were prone to regard my studies as impractical and airy-fairy but which negated any opportunity for me to enrol locally as a horny-handed son of toil with the prospect of a farm of my own. So it is fascinating to explore the parallels.

ONE LONG HOLIDAY

The working class Northerners in England versus England are treated very sympathetically by Doris Lessing. Charlie’s father is a working class paragon who has spent his life as a miners’ representative giving free advice about pensions, claims, work rules, allowances, form filling and disputes to his fellow miners and their families.

Charlie’s mother is a selfless servant of the family ‘standing all day in the kitchen, pandering to her charges every whim, when she’s not doing housework or making a hundred trips a day to that bloody coal [hole/store]’.

Charlie’s younger brother Lennie is already financially independent, pulling in £17 per week working in a local foundry, and talking of marrying and raising a family – not like Charlie who is likely, ‘if he passes his examination to be running around licking peoples arses to get a job – Bachelor of Arts, Oxford and a drug on the market’. Even though Charlie’s education is costing the family an extra £200 per year and this is delaying Lennie leaving home, Lennie is not resentful.

And the old couple on the train that Charlie joins from Doncaster to London are warm, chatty and chivvying if somewhat formulaic in their belief that ‘you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, and there’s no other way of looking at it’.

What strikes me particularly about these people is their passivity and acquiescence. This is not the North of the 1960s that I knew – or indeed the North that the New Wave / Kitchen Sink Drama films of the period recall.

For a start, as Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers makes all too clear, albeit in an earlier era, there was a frequently a good deal of gender conflict, with manual working fathers pitched against wives with genteel notions. And with the men opting for or banished to the pub to socialize with other males, the women ruled the homes and had a disproportionate influence on the rearing of the children

Secondly, the educational wedge that was driving families apart was the 11 Plus Examination that drafted the more academically gifted to grammar schools and the less gifted to secondary modern schools where more practical training was supplied. Charlie’s ‘Scholarship Boy’ problem affected very few families and it was the wider issue of separating out the best and brightest and ‘civilising’ them to Southern/ Received English mores that did the real damage to Northern working class society and solidarity.

And the other thing that it is missing, as a kind of drab back-drop in Lessing’s story, is any reference or sense of the influence of the Second World War.

Although you can search and find no direct references to WW2 in films like Room at the Top (1959), Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), and A Kind of Loving (1962), I would argue that it is implicit in many scenes.

The War had opened up Northern society which had been thrown back into the spotlight as a manufacturing centre for arms, planes, ships and tanks, reactivating the supporting coal, iron and textile [and farming] industries. It had given new roles to women and led in 1945 to a totally new start in government to build a home fit for heroes.

But by the 1960S, British industry was starting to flag dreadfully in the wake of competition from overseas producers with newer plants and more flexible labour forces. And the wave of reconstruction that spawned council house estates and tower blocks, that had at first created excitement and gratitude led on to anomie and dystopia – as did the increased mechanization of mining and manufacturing tasks which broke down workplace camaraderie.

The result was that the better educated young people of the 1960s inherited the expectation of improvement from their parents, overlaid by a strong sense that their society had been short-changed by London.

In my own case, WW2 intruded directly as my father had been killed in the RAF and my mother had, in all probability, become a victim of post-traumatic stress from bereavement and experiencing firsthand the Luftwaffe’s bombing Blitz. My abiding memory though is of her tirades, when she was on her high horse, against the 11 Plus Examination – partly because it drafted capable people away from manual work [which she regarded as inherently virtuous], and partly because it encouraged social mobility by pulling up bright kids from the working class - thus disturbing the social order, which, among other things preserved a distinction between the working class and the lower middle class [basically between those people who should be able to run a car and those who should not].

As you can imagine, these attitudes were hard for me to reconcile with winning entry to Cambridge University – as was my stepfather’s summation that, following my success, my life was now ‘One Long Holiday’.

 A RECONNAISSANCE SAFARI TO THE NORTH

My own assessment is that, as a jobbing writer in the 1960s who had to make a living, Doris Lessing decided that she had to get in on the act with Northern Kitchen Sink drama by writing England versus England. I imagine her catching the steam train to Doncaster and booking into a pub / hotel near the railway station, with notebook in hand. In the evening, she sits in the bar nursing a Gin and Tonic or a Sherry, taking notes. And after a bus trip from Doncaster to Barnsley the following day, she feels ready to return to Hampstead.

'At the bus stop Charlie turned to look back at the village, now a hollow of black, streaked and spattered with sullen wet lights ... how he hated the village'.

But Lessing was not English, she was not a native – she was an expatriate observer living an arty and cosmopolitan life in London. She didn’t need to go Up North to explore working class mores. There are plenty of council houses and council flats in North London. And I suspect that she just thought she ‘knew’ Oxford from a prior acquaintance with Sebastian Flyte.

But there is another personal parallel I want to raise in my take on England versus England. Both Lessing and I left our birth places to settle overseas as expatriate outsiders. In her case, she left Southern Rhodesia [later Zimbabwe] to live in London – in my case I left the UK to live in New Zealand.

Now both colonial societies coexist with what I term ‘Significant Others’ – that is challenging indigenous groups – a clear but vocal Maori minority in New Zealand and a much more threatening African majority in the former Rhodesia. And it seems to me that the presence of Significant Other cultures in a settler country tends to simplify thought processes about society - such that following the normally hum drum basics of European social interactions can become a sacred norm for the colonists. To do otherwise breaks ranks and opens the whole colonial edifice to inspection.

So I start by observing that Doris Lessing was both uniquely placed for objectivity but poorly equipped in experience to tackle the problems posed by the English Class System.

Seeking to adopt a neutral stance about Charlie’s predicament, she inhabits two personalities. The first is that of a Mike, the Irish barman of the pub close to Doncaster Railway Station where Charlie takes refuge from the rain while he awaits his train south. The second is that of a ‘pretty upper-class’ girl on the train who steps in when he has insulted an old working class couple who are off on a bit of a spree to see their daughter Joyce who lives in Streatham.

Mike is resigned and laconic but hides a deep bitterness towards his adopted country: ‘I’ve lived thirty years in this mucking country, and if you arrogant sods knew what I am thinking half the time ...’

When Mike and Charlie discuss a murder trial that has been reported in the newspaper, Charlie comments about the accused being given leave to appeal:

‘Well, I mean to say, there’s some decency left, then. I mean if the case can be reviewed it shows that they do care about something at least’.

To which Mike replies:

‘I don’t see it your way at all. It’s England versus England, that’s all. Fair play all round, but they’ll hang the poor sod on the day appointed as usual’.

And there is one of the key issues laid bare – the degree to which English people of all classes and regional origins can be expected to share a common code of ‘decency’. Implicitly it seems to me that Lessing is suggesting that decency is the glue that bound English society together at that time in the absence of Significant Others. This is too simple.

I see antagonism between North and South that sometimes transcends decencies. And I remember a sense of anger. 

As for the decency in the North itself, there is of course an important literature on this topic centred on Richard Hoggart's 'The Uses of Literacy ' (1957 ). This implies that Northern Working Class Life was once infused with a strange and uniquely pure spirit of decency. No doubt Lessing was following Hoggart but it is not an argument that holds that much credence with me. I have always been more for the North's radical past and its political orators and agitators. Indeed one of the aspects of Charlie's character that I find hard to accept is his seeming lack of political consciousness or drive for protest and rebellion.

THREE GIRLS

I find Lessing’s treatment of the love affairs in Charlie’s life to be the most unsatisfactory element in the story.

Although he is an impoverished Scholarship Boy who is subsidized to the tune of £200 a year by his struggling parents and younger brother, Charlie does not generally return to his native mining village in the university vacations, rather he flats in London with his friends and girlfriends. I can tell you now that this would not have happened in reality - Charlie would have come home for the vacs and worked in the local shops or as a hospital porter [as I did at one point] to earn some cash

And women cost money, even if they let you share their flat. Not only that, I find it implausible that a ‘tall, over-thin, big-boned’ boy should be such a lady-killer in the South as to be able to run two girlfriends simultaneously, or that he would in fact have pursued one let alone two sexual relationships in the early 1960s – given the residual Puritanism that afflicted many young Northerners and the well-drilled admonitions of their parents about the dangers and disgraces of ‘getting girls into trouble’.

In the early 1960s, society was on the move - but slowly. At Cambridge, if you were caught with a girl in your room at College after 6.00 pm, you ran the real danger of instantly being ‘sent down’

So in layering Charlie’s conflicts with sexual choices between a lower middle class clergyman’s daughter Jenny [‘bookish, a bit of a prig, but a nice girl’] and ‘another girl he disliked’ Sally [a tall crisp middle class girl with whom ‘the act of sex was a slow, cold subjugation of her by him’] seems heavily contrived to me. But with the unsatisfactory relationship with Sally, Lessing drives home the supposed irony of a ‘horny-handed son of toil winning by his unquenched virility the beautiful daughter of the moneyed classes’.

Both girls it seems are chumps – wasting time with a penniless student who has limited job prospects – and both are remarkable promiscuous for the times. Methinks it is Lessing’s London that has come to the fore here supplanting South Yorkshire.

And then there is the nameless third girl on the train [‘pretty and upper class with a cool and self-sufficient little face’] who has the temerity to chide Charlie about his mockery of the old couple who are off to see their daughter in Streatham:

‘Stop it!

‘If you don’t stop I’m going to call the guard and have you put in another compartment.

‘Can’t you see [she says to the old couple] he’s laughing at you? Can’t you see?’

She is the second ‘impartial’ observer introduced by Lessing in addition to Mike the barman. And I have the strong suspicion that she becomes the voice of the author in protecting the status quo and a sense of decency, though Charlie mutters ‘small from his diaphragm’ ... ‘that bloody little bint I’ll kill her’.

Doris Lessing the Communist as an upper class cool and self-sufficient little face – surely you must be joking? Not really. I think that as an expatriate she struggled to see the conflicts in Northern society and that her Hampstead lifestyle was much more in tune with the aristocracy than it was with the Northern off-cuts.

And she couldn’t resist making Charlie into a cad and a misogynist to match her generic concerns about patrimony and the call for a feminist response in 1960s London.

THE VOICE WITHIN

There are a number of themes in England versus England but I have not yet touched on perhaps the most important – Charlie’s descent into Clinical Depression and his presumed subsequent suicide.

Charlie has not so much as a chip on his shoulder as a demon. The demon is his 'enemy' self taking down his self-esteem and his self-confidence, as is illustrated by the following passage.

‘The enemy behind his right shoulder began satirically tolling a bell and intoned:

“Charlie Thornton, in his third year at Oxford, was found dead in a gas-filled bed-sitting-room this morning. He had been overworking. Death from natural causes.”

‘The enemy added a loud rude raspberry and fell silent. But he was waiting: Charlie could feel him there waiting’.

Anyone who has ever suffered CD [and I count myself fortunate in this regard because it ultimately can be a life-enhancing experience] will recognize the ‘enemy’ or Black Dog. Lessing writes so authoritatively here because she writes from experience.

But the prime drivers of Charlie’s depression are given as a fear of failing his exams and an ‘existence that is a perpetual reminder to his family that they are nothing but ignorant non-cultured clods’.

Trying to run two women at the same time on a pittance is not given any shrift - though it would drive me bonkers in no time!

But, drawing on my own experience, I can certainly endorse the fear of failure as a contributor to depression though making my family feel small would not figure in my calculus. Much more likely it seems would be a feeling by Charlie that his origins represented the stable and the decent – a mythical land where hard physical labour was rewarded by an honest day’s pay and a sound night’s sleep - leaving him the Scholarship Boy himself as an idling impostor.

In other words for many of us, it was not so much ‘the continuous strain of adapting to middle-class mores that are foreign’ that drove us to confusion, it was the loss of something very precious – our sense of homeland and belonging. What the Maori of New Zealand term the ‘turangawaewae’ – the ancestral lands and hearths.

So the Scholarship Boys coped with their predicaments in a variety of ways. The most obvious was to adopt middle class mores, speak Standard English and move to the South East – the Fitting In Strategy. The next, which became more plausible after the North had established itself as a good place to come from in the late 1960s was the Professional Northerner Strategy [perfected by presenters like Melvin Bragg, Michael Parkinson and Jeremy Paxman].

And then there were those who simply went back home at fitted into the Local Bourgeoisie as provincial lawyers, lecturers, school teachers, accountants etc. In my case, my stepfather sort of arranged for me to be taken on by a local auctioneering firm where I would in the course of time moved from selling stock to selling property. How I would have fared is an interesting conjecture.

In my case though things were already more complicated. I was a step child who also lived in two physical worlds. At 7.20 am I left the farm on my bike and cycled to the main road where I caught a bus to Chester. I got back at 5.20 pm every night, in the dark during the winter. During the day I was a townie school kid – otherwise I was a sort of Farmer’s Boy.

And farming itself, where I came from, was something of a strange business. In D. H. Lawrence’s novels, there is a good deal of interaction between the children of miners and the children from small farms adjoining the mining villages. Not so in Cheshire where the dairy farms are much larger and more widely spaced, with many being very distant from industrial settlements.

There had always been sons from farms though who couldn’t get on with an overbearing father or who despaired of ever having a farm of their own – and they would find jobs in towns like Crewe or Stoke-on-Trent building locomotives or helping manufacture rubber tyres.

As for the farmers themselves, they occupied a peculiar niche in Class System. If times were good they could breed race horses and hunt with the aristocracy – with some marrying or at least having affairs with Lady Toffs. If times were bad, they hunkered down and supplemented home kills and home cures with rabbits and bought in barrels of herrings.

As my stepfather was the middle son from a farming family who was recruited as a farm manager in 1949, he was again betwixt and between. I have though the most dreadful memories of him being humiliated by the tasks he was assigned by the owner of the farm who was a member of the aristocracy. Finding it difficult to speak Standard English under stress, he would miss his aitches or add them where they were not needed as he stammered, for example,  to explain to Mrs C the difficulties of recording the milk outputs of every cow and heifer by weighing the buckets into which each milking was poured.

Perhaps above all, this drove me to treasure and camouflage the chip on my shoulder and become a Blending Chameleon. And eventually, I came to see the upwardly mobile sons and daughters of the working class as my people, even though my own background was much more regional, rural and traditional.

Like many of my contemporaries from this class at Cambridge, I revelled in the city life of the city itself and the company of girls who worked behind the counter of Boots the Chemist or Heffers Bookshop, supplemented by the more exotic charms of foreign au pairs and language students. The Dorothy Ballroom, the Still and Sugarloaf cellar pub, the Criterion and the Rex Cinema – ah it was very heaven to be young!

Being a Chameleon who was never afraid of hard work and ever full of adventure and chutzpah, I then travelled the world reinventing myself as I went along. Eventually I found myself working at a fairly high level at the Asian Development Bank in Manila, Philippines. And embarked on the promotion of a study of new financial instruments in 1990 that took me to discussions with representatives of the Bank of England and the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, I checked in to a posh hotel in London, in the late autumn of that year, amid a cold and bitter rain.

My mother had died two years before,  ending as I thought our very troubled relationship. I had also just weathered, with my young family, a bloody coup d’etat in Manila in 1989 in which 22 buildings in Makati were occupied by rebels, adjacent to the residential village where we lived. A hundred or so people had been killed and around 600 injured. There is nothing worse than fearing for your children. And as a fellow Irish expatriate exclaimed ‘war had been declared’ in the Middle East in the shape of the First Gulf War, just to add to the sense of chaos.

I decided that I would take some time out to visit the chapel at King’s College, London while I was in England so that I could view the War Memorial there on which my father’s name had been engraved. As I reached the chapel, the choir was singing ‘The Day thou Gavest Lord is Ended’ at Evensong. I didn’t exactly break into tears – tears broke me.

Later back in Manila, after some gruelling bureaucratics, marital unhappinesses and the eruption of Mt Pinatubo [which covered everything, including the pillow on your bed, in fine ash], I finally buckled. Finishing a day’s work, I sat immobilized in the ADB car park. And as the enemy sat behind my shoulder, I looked at myself in the car mirror with tears in my eyes, and back-chatted my tormentor with a dread-filled challenge:

“My Life is Not One Long Holiday”.