‘The Other Group’s Work’

Barry is a dedicated member of the Pudsey writers group and has contributed a great deal to the Relay project. At last weeks workshop he read out this response to some of the writing from the Time Together group:

The simplicity and integrity of the pieces impressed me most of all.
The work as a whole was as varied as the individuals writing the pieces.
The language didn’t bother me. I saw this struggle to master a foreign language – a difficult language and something l’m incapable of – as an inspiration to us.

This quaint, these oddities, of language/s also gave the pieces an air of authenticity.

The two pieces that especially impressed me were…
a).. The Kite The grammar was excellent, but that was not the point really.
It showed not only a true understanding of English grammar and vocabulary, but also embodied the essence of poetry’. It said something beyond the words.

In my opinion, if your mind is geared in such a way, one finds it easy to make up rhymes, and then you often think you’ve created a poem, but it takes a poet to say something beyond those rhymes; to express what you are really trying to say. I find it an incredibly difficult and lengthy process to write poetry.

b)..A piece by Kahlid… ‘In the very hot summer…’ it begins and goes on to describe in a very down beat, succinct way the horrendous environment of his country.

I felt humbled after reading it. In England we grumble…but he didn’t, he just got on with life…wow ! ! ! The honest integrity and humility of the account overrode the lack of accuracy in his English.

I try to write as I talk, sometimes it’s as successful as Kahlid, other times it comes across as a bit laboured, but I try not to let it become self-consciously ‘Yorkshire accent’. Kahlid was quite un-self-conscious in his language. Some truly poetic phases/expressions came out.
‘My father had joined the hawks in the hills’, I believe he wrote.
His illustration of the fig tree…
… marvelous touches, I thought.
Of all the writers he is the one I’d like to be able emulate.

The others showed different life styles…
The Sudanese Wedding Ceremonies
Going to School for the First Time’ was quite touching, I thought.

The guy who educated himself from grass roots up seemed quite a guy. He’d obviously taken all the courses I’d taken (I recognised Belbin and Maslow) but he’d gone much further than me. One wonders how many there out there who have a similar potential, but not the chance…or in England, one wonders about the one’s who don’t take the chance…

Barry Fox

School Days

At last weeks workshop we were looking at Kia’s work that describes his first day at school and how his Dad had forgotten to collect him. This seemed to strike a chord with the rest of the group. Especially with Mona who had the audacity to bite her teacher on her first day at school. Not just any old teacher either – it was the Head Mistress.

I can’t remember my first day but I can clearly recollect running away from school at the age of five. This was back in the 1970’s when school doors wre left open and there wasn’t any CCTV observing our every move. I thought my mum would be really pleased to see me when I got home. She wasn’t and I was frog-marched back to my class room and told off by our severe Head Teacher.

Schools can be confusing places for small children with their strange rules and complicated playground rituals. Roger McGough sums it up in his poem My First Day At School:

Giddy Aunts

Molly’s Auntie Rhoda and Uncle Jim

We’ve been focussing on identity in the Relay workshops and looking at our own family photos as a way of tapping into the richness of our personal experiences. I’ve mentioned Molly’s piece of writing before, about her sophisticated Auntie Rhoda who owned the much longed for ornament of a naked water nymph. Molly’s Aunt sounds like one of those people who can get away with anything because they’re oblivious to the fact that they don’t fit neatly into one category.‘

‘Rhoda was self opinionated and giddy – always ready to hear a ‘risque’ joke or chat with a strange man in a pub, and yet equally happy joining in with her Jim and the other nine hundred and ninety eight at the ‘cathedral of the north’ (Eastbrook Hall Methodist chapel in Bradford) in a glorious rendering of ‘Oh For A Thousand Tongues To Sing’. Molly’s developing this piece further and you can read her latest draft here.

After hearing Molly talk about her Auntie Rhoda I stumbled across something similar written by author Monica McInerney about her Aunt Jacqueline in last Saturday’s Guardian Weekend.

‘I revelled in how out-spoken she was. How funny. Generous. How she wore lots of red lipstick and always smelled good. How she drove a Mini (badly, I realised later – but it felt daredevil at the time). She was also bossy, argumentative, quick-witted and wonderful company. She died too young, before I had a chance to know her as an adult, and before I had a chance to tell her what an impact she’d had on my life.’ Read the full article here .

We all need vivid-but-safe characters like Aunt Jacqueline and Auntie Rhoda around us as we’re growing up. They show us glimpses of another way of being and are reassuring proof that its ok to be bold. Maybe even fun.

 

Every man’s memory is his private literature – Aldous Huxley

We saw some fascinating things at the Leeds Museum Discovery Centre on Friday. Many of these things would have been considered quite ordinary by the people who used them in their everyday lives years ago. But to us, in 2008, they are a window into the past; a window through which we can see other people’s lives. But the Discovery Centre isn’t just a place where objects from the past are stored, it is also a treasure trove of memories and ideas. It was easy to imagine that many memories associated with the things that we looked at were also stored in the building. There were times, as we held and touched some of those things, and heard about what they might have been used for, that I could feel some of those memories in the room with us. I found myself imagining some of the stories attached to the cards sent to soldiers fighting in the First World War; the rocking horses that children played on so many years ago; the cards sent to family and friends to celebrate Eid; the beautiful hand made clothes from Palestine. Who is to say that traces of the personalities of the people who owned these things did not linger in the room as we looked at them? Who could say that there were not memories released by the things that we saw. As I drove home I thought of a line from a poem by Muriel Rukeyser (who was both a poet and a scientist): ‘The universe is made of stories, not atoms.’

The visit to the Discovery Centre also made me think of the parallels between the way we sometimes treat precious objects and people who are precious to us. Most people know that during the Second World War many thousands of children were evacuated from big cities such as London to the countryside, where they would be far less likely to be bombed. But not so many people know that precious things were also evacuated from museums and art galleries in the big cities to secret locations in the countryside. Valuable paintings from the National Gallery in London were evacuated and stored in a slate mine in Wales for safe keeping. Naomi told me how last summer, when Sheffield was flooded, many exhibits were rescued from the water and evacuated to cities and towns that hadn’t been waterlogged, for safekeeping. In times of war, and natural disasters such as floods, we are desperate to rescue our memories, our past, so that we have something to help us return to normal when times get better.

I wonder how many things that we use every day and think of as nothing special would appear fascinating to people in a hundred years time? This penknife, that mobile phone, the train ticket in your pocket. Maybe in the next century a group will visit the centre and ask to look at a collection of such things from the year 2008. What, I wonder, will they make of them? What do you think they would write about them? Ray

Ray’s Father

This is a photo of my father standing at the wheel of the Cutty Sark in Greenwich. It was taken in 1984, when I was living in London. It’s a bitterly cold, clear day in January and I am struck, yet again, by how much more comfortable my dad looks when he’s outside. In every photo taken of him in our house in Newport, or at my aunt’s house in Ireland, he looks withdrawn, distracted, anxious. Often he’s looking away, or down at the floor, despite repeated requests to look at the camera, please Dad. Neither do I have any photos of my parents together that I like, because in all of these my father looks ill at ease, on trial, his body language that of a man about to bolt for it the moment he hears the camera click. Naturally this makes it difficult for my mother to relax, and consequently they look like a couple trying to avoid having a row. But this is one of my favourite photos of my father because, for once, he looks relatively relaxed. I’m sure it helps that he’s on a ship, and this photo, in turn, reminds me of a much earlier photo of him that used to stand on top of a glass cabinet in our front room at home in Newport. It was taken in 1943 or 1944 when he was in the British Navy, and he cuts a strikingly handsome figure in his uniform, but with a hint of wildness in his expression. When I was young I couldn’t decide if that wildness was aggression or anxiety. As I grew older I became convinced that it was a combination of both; how often do people lose their temper in order to cover up their own fear? Quite often, I think. I imagine, though, that hint of wildness was very attractive to my mother. Every friend or girlfriend I ever brought back to the house commented on what a handsome man he’d been in his prime, and I was sure that I suffered in comparison.
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