Feast

Milky, strong-edged fingers,

Comforting by possessing,

Pierce the resistance;

Bitterness rolling together,

Brittle daylight's capitulation to the salty flesh

Smeared with vinegar and singing

Present yet not present.

So much inside though without,

Warm, red darkness of a vast glowing room.

Formless twin forms

Selfish in melting,

Composed of vivid greed.

Pregnant layers simmer and froth,

A brimming hush, abstemious, 

Gleaming and flecked with sun

Surges to pooled celebration.

For S

Olga Hanks 1923-2015

My grandmother Olga Florence Baudains was born in 1923 in Jersey.  Growing up on a farm with one brother, Rodney, of a similar age, the young Olga had what sounded like an idyllic childhood.  She wrote about ‘roaming the fields at will, climbing into the hayloft to play with newly-born kittens, feeding the hens and playing ball games in the yard’ although she did admit that as a child she envied her town cousins who had bathrooms and electric light, and couldn’t really understand why they thought life on the farm was so wonderful!

An excellent student, her school reports consistently praising her conscientiousness, Olga persuaded her parents to allow her to stay in school to take her school certificate when she was sixteen.  From a young age she’d admired the skill of the typists she glimpsed in offices and longed to join them, so secretarial college followed, before Olga achieved her ambition by excelling, in her teens and twenties, at a number of clerical posts, including one at Lloyds Bank.

In July 1940, when Olga was sixteen, German troops landed in the Channel Islands and took them over in occupation.  For the next five years the islanders were trapped under Nazi rule, enduring increasing hardship and poverty, draconian military laws and the threat of deportation to concentration camps for the smallest infraction.  Although the sheer number of occupying troops made resistance difficult, islanders expressed their hatred of the regime in small acts of defiance.  After radios were banned, they learnt how to make crystal sets and would listen covertly to the BBC for news of the war not filtered through the German propaganda machine.   One day a German search party came to Olga’s house before their illegal radio set could be hidden and Olga’s quick-thinking mother distracted the soldiers with a bustle of cleaning and hid the radio up her jumper!

After D-Day things became even worse for the island as even the Germans’ supply lines to Europe were cut, and islanders and occupiers alike were close to starvation.  When liberation finally came in 1945 the relief and joy was so great that even 50 years later the memory caused Olga to weep.

As they sat in church in September 1939, Olga’s lifelong best friend Marguerite whispered to her excitedly that a new young man was coming to preach.  Olga watched as Peter Hanks, a young Welsh Lay Pastor in his early 20s ascended the pulpit, then turned back to her friend. ‘I don’t think much of him’ Olga whispered.

But of course, as with so many love stories, from this unpromising beginning grew, first a friendship, then something more, and shortly before Olga turned 21, Peter proposed.  However, in those days trainee ministers were not permitted to be married, so the engagement was kept under wraps until at last in 1948 Olga and Peter’s wedding was finally able to take place in the family church in Jersey.  The pictures show Peter smiling broadly in his clerical collar and Olga looking very pretty in a parachute-silk wedding dress with flowers in her hair.

After a honeymoon in Chester, the couple moved to Stone, Staffordshire, Peter to his new church appointment and Olga to begin her life’s work as a minister’s wife.

Olga took her role very seriously, not only as devoted wife, but as right-hand woman and key source of support to the Minister and circuit.  Methodist ministers moved church, in general, every three years, and on arrival in every new appointment Olga would immediately set to her pastoral work, forming women’s groups, toddler groups and Sunday Schools, hosting meetings, tea parties and dinners, visiting the sick, new mothers, and grieving families.  She had an uncanny knack of finding common ground with anyone, an eye for who was feeling excluded and a way of drawing people out, of making them feel listened to and appreciated.

Ministry was as much a vocation to Olga as to her husband - her own words about her life as a minister’s wife were as follows.

‘I have opened fetes, cut anniversary cakes, scrubbed floors, painted schoolrooms and washed tea towels.  It has been a privilege.

But the greater privilege has been all the people I have met over the years.  I have offered transport to a convicted murderer one day and had lunch in the members’ dining room at the House of Commons on another.  I have lost count of the number of wedding receptions I have attended (always wearing the same hat!) and of all the funerals where I have wept with people in their sorrow.’

As well as her work, Olga’s family was hugely important to her.  She remained close to her brother Rodney and his wife Mabel, in Jersey, until their deaths very recently, and especially to their daughter Catherine who read the lesson today.  Emails and phone calls flew backwards and forwards between Jersey and Dorset at least once a week, with Olga and Rodney spending hours on the phone bickering good-naturedly as they did throughout their long lives as close siblings, while Catherine kept Olga up to date with all the gossip from the island that Olga still regarded in many ways as home.

Olga and Peter’s daughter Alison, my Mother, who was born in Shropshire in 1951, was a close companion throughout Olga’s life.  After they retired from the ministry Olga and Peter moved to Dorset to be closer to Alison, her husband Rod - also a Methodist minister, you can’t move for them in our family! - and to me, her one grandchild.  We were a close family, often spending time all together, going to the seaside or eating Sunday lunch.  We stuck together in tough times too, after her husband Peter died suddenly in 1987 Olga became even more a part of her daughter’s family, later enduring with us her son-in-law’s long illness.  Olga lived independently - with much appreciated support from her daughter - until late last year, when she moved to Wolfeton Manor Care Home in Charminster, quickly making friends among the residents and staff and enjoying her bay-windowed room with its view of the gardens and the hills beyond.

I always loved visiting my Gran; when I was small she would often have a jar of sweets for me to dip my hand into and was always game for joining in my schemes, from acting the grown-up parts in make-believe plays to helping me catch baby frogs in the long grass at the back of her garden.  As I got older she remained a big part of my life as we talked about everything from friends to faith, work, relationships, worries and challenges, often laughing hysterically over the scrapes we always seemed to get into.

Olga was spirited and cheeky with a keen sense of the ridiculous.  She was sharp minded with wide interests - she was a keen Scrabble player - and had a good memory for an anecdote.  Although she sometimes found going out difficult she was naturally sociable, always welcoming to old friends and always keen to make a new connection.  

On her 92nd birthday, which fell just a few weeks before she died, I was on a flight which was the first I’d been on with inflight wifi.  I knew Gran would appreciate the fun of an email from the air and as I got my laptop out to write to her it struck me how often I found myself thinking ‘I must tell Gran that’ when something interesting happened.  That day I told her about the concert I’d just done in Norway and of how I could see the clouds beneath me as I wrote from the cabin - ‘I know it’s unusual so I feel so lucky’ I signed off ‘that I have a grandmother who is also my friend’.

Betrayal (I Fagiolini) - a review

Early-music vocal ensemble I Fagiolini recently premiered their long-awaited follow up to the 2004 sensation ‘The Full Monteverdi’.  The original show, resulting from a collaboration between Robert Hollingworth’s acclaimed vocal group and director John La Bouchardière, reimagined Monteverdi’s fourth book of madrigals as an immersive piece of music theatre, set in a restaurant at which the audience are also diners.  This new collaboration takes the same concept to the music of the 16^th century composer Carlo Gesualdo; the music known for its daring dissonance, the man for his infamous murder of his wife and her lover.

The show, staged on its London leg in the Village Underground in Shoreditch, is an ‘immersive dramatisation’ of Gesualdo’s music and legend ‘set in hidden corners of real-life urban locations, Betrayal investigates what could drive someone to such extremes.’

The show takes place in a railway arch, in near total darkness, in a large space without any division of audience and performers and with minimal set and props.  Perhaps in 2004 some of this was revolutionary, now it’s all very much par-for-the-immersive-theatre-course, even in conservative classical music. 

Each of the six singers of I Fagiolini is paired with a dancer, forming a couple whose passion, infidelity and anger is expressed through the music, dance and their interaction, isolated as they are from the rest of the performers in their own section of the space.  The intention, I presume, is that the audience moves freely around, dipping into different stories, but the cramped space it was very difficult actually to circulate, meaning that most punters picked one couple and stuck to them, making the experience more of a single play-let, rather than a series of interconnected stories.  Perhaps a larger space or fewer audience members would have meant a more general experience.

The music, firstly, is remarkable - hearing so much Gesualdo together gets one really dug into his twisted sound world, and hearing the parts in isolation (or at least hearing one part right up close and the others in the background, as one focusses on one performer) really accentuates the unsettling nature of the harmonic language, pointing the dissonances with resulting almost physical effect on the audience.  It's an amazingly exciting way of hearing this music; I wish I'd seen The Full Monteverdi for comparison, but I'd suggest that this show might be even more valuable to Gesualdo's music than that was to Monteverdi's.

The voices are big and not as straight as purists might expect but the tuning is scarily good, especially given the spadefuls of mitigating factors; physical lack of proximity, dry acoustic, the physical demands of the production and the sheer bloody difficulty of the music!  However, so far, so standard for an excellent group; what is really exciting vocally is the sheer passion in the voices, at times uncomfortably raw and admirably unafraid to explore ugliness in the sound – brave, committed and utterly in service to the ensemble impact of the show.

The concept of the production in general is strong; this is unsettling music and an unsettling and unsafe-feeling setting is very appropriate.  I’ll admit to being a bit of a cynic when it comes to some of the more toe-curling tropes of immersive theatre (stern and belligerent ushers dressed as security guards telling you sharply to ‘keep the noise down’ on entry, for instance) but an undeniable atmosphere is created from first entry to the space.  There’s a strong sense of voyeurism to the experience which makes it feel grubby and seedy at times, again serving the music admirably.  On entry to the unlit space, littered with crime-scene paraphernalia, audience members are handed a dim, blue torch with which to snoop on the private lives of the characters, complicit in the disturbing behaviour.  Light-touch stewarding during the show means that audience and performers are not separated - a ballsy decision from a production point of view (one wonders how the performers feel about the risk-factors of this!) but one which adds the frisson of having to get out of the way as a performer pushes past, stopping the audience feeling comfortable or complacent at any point.

However this is all experiential dressing around a rather empty dramatic centre.  In the moment, the drama between baritone Greg Skidmore and dancer Eleesha Drennan (the only couple I managed to watch at any length) was effective.  The dancer’s death from poisoning about halfway through was beautifully and almost unwatchably visceral and the singer’s vitriol while she was dying so effective that the whole section leaving one quite breathless.  There were moments of beauty from then on, palpable, slow-creeping remorse and a moving moment when the singer wrapped the dancer’s dead arms around him as though to mimic the devotion lost from her in life, but in general the section following the death felt overlong and lacking in momentum, direction limited and static, with the performers doing their best with little to work with.

This interesting production is in so many ways a success, with a solid concept and peerless performances, but somehow, it all seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts.

Choose [suburban] life

A matchbox of our own

A fence of real chain link,

A grill out on the patio

Disposal in the sink

A washer and a dryer and an ironing machine

In a tract house that we share

Somewhere that's green.

Little Shop of Horrors

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a f**king big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin can openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of f**king fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the f*ck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing f**king junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, f**ked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life . . .

But why would I want to do a thing like that?

I chose not to choose life: I chose something else.

Trainspotting

Two quotations from two very different films which each say something very different about aspiration.  

In the former, from Little Shop of Horrors, set in the 60s, Audrey daydreams about an escape from her grimy inner-city life to the peaceful suburbs; while in the infamous speech from 1996’s Trainspotting Renton viciously rejects the suburban ideal in favour of the oblivion of heroin.

Renton's speech is a rant against the acceptable face of consumerism.  Granted, he's justifying the car-crash his life has become due to his heroin habit, but the sharpness of his cynical mind still maintains a righteous anger and revulsion at what aspirational life has become; a cookie-cutter dystopia in which desire is managed and everyone wants the same stuff, the same respectable accomplishments, the same clean, predictable life.  By choosing heroin, Renton pugnaciously turns his back on ordinary life, on aspiration, on any sense of working to make things better.  A nihilistic impulse, born of privilege?  Of the boredom of always having enough, of not ever really having to fight for anything?  Or a refusal to fight, a refusal to play the game which he perceives is never really winnable, which will never actually make him happy.  If everything for which he is encouraged to work is meaningless to him, where is the motivation to work at all?  

Why not just get high?

In contrast Audrey has a touching trust in the most mundane of middle-class aspirations; wishing not for diamonds and a mansion, but simply an exchange of her grey, cramped inner-city life for a taste of the peacefulness and safety that her suburban dream represents.  The era is slightly different, but the things she idealises so in the 60s (‘a washer and a dryer and an ironing machine’) are the same sort of consumer goods which so disgust Renton in the 90s (‘choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin can openers’).  For Audrey the very uniformity of the lifestyle she craves is a source of attraction, not revulsion; the ‘tract house’ for which she longs, known for its its unvarying, bland sameness; acre after peaceful acre of wide, quiet, tidy streets, inhabited by quiet, tidy people with peaceful, comfortable lives.

What for Audrey is safety, for Renton is suffocation; for him a prison, for her an escape from one.

But is Renton simply spoiled by not really having known hardship?  Growing up in Edinburgh in the 80s, he could expect a free education, subsidised housing and free medical attention if sick.  His immediate basic needs met, he was theoretically free to aspire to something other than inner-city poverty, it’s just that he chose to believe that the ‘better life’ suggested to him is not good enough for him.  If Audrey grew up in grinding poverty in a two-up, two-down with an outside toilet, sharing a bed with three siblings and with nothing to hope for in life but early marriage to a man working six days a week at the same factory as his dad and his granddad before him, spent and exhausted at 45 from hard work and cold and bad food; or seeing her children die in infancy from respiratory disease from the damp, or fevers which spread like wildfire in the cramped, unsanitary conditions or just never managing to thrive in a world where there is never, never quite enough for everyone, can she be blamed for her need for comfort, for peace, for predictability?  

How dare Renton sneer at her ‘sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing f**king junk food into [her] mouth’ when that comfortable couch and more than enough to eat and her own television represent wonders beyond Audrey’s wildest childhood dreams?  How dare Renton squander the advantages he has been given?  Give up on aspiration and responsibility and making something of the privileges he takes so much for granted?

Or is Renton right?  Have they both, in fact, been sold; their potential for uniqueness stifled by the only aspiration available being the aspiration of being just like everyone else?  In the deprivations given Audrey and the advantages given Renton, the missing element is the confidence in a world where personal aspirations are valued and where individuality is not only tolerated but encouraged.

What if the real poverty is not that of the lack of comfort and safety, but of hope?