Susan Beckerleg

Posted on 28/12/2021 by Bobby Seal
Susan Beckerleg

Susan Beckerleg

I first met Susan Beckerleg in 1974. She and the girl I was going out with at the time shared a house in Tottenham and had been friends at school in Devon. She was introduced to me as ‘Beckanarm’, her nickname at school, and that was the name I affectionately called her in the 1970s and on the handful of occasions we met in subsequent decades. Susan died in 2012; a tragic early loss. Having touched on this time and place in my last blog post, I decided I wanted to write this piece as a tribute to her.

 

 

Passfield

Passfield Hall Bar

Susan was studying social anthropology at the LSE, and went on to complete her PhD in Swahili medicine at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She was passionate about her subject and used to delight in conducting experiments on the small group of friends she had gathered about her. I recall one evening in particular when a few of us were in the bar at the LSE’s Passfield Hall. Susan decided she wanted to test the proposition that the most intimate and trusting, though not overtly sexual, physical contact between two human beings was to allow the other person to lick your eyeballs. This we all did, in the interests of science, before collapsing into uncontrollable laughter.

East Africa

Research in East Africa

While Beckanarm herself was a confident, outgoing person from a middle-class background, she had a knack of befriending those who were alone and always identified with society’s ignored and marginalised minorities. This characteristic was reflected in her later research and her academic career. But she was more than just an ordinary academic; Beckanarm’s researches in Uganda and Kenya led to important improvements in the healthcare of female heroin users.

 

 

As students in London in the 1970s, I and most of my friends arrived as hippies and left as punks. Beckanarm, on the other hand, rose above such whims of fashion and created her own style. I remember her going off to her evening job at a taxi office in Seven Sisters wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, crimson silk gown and harem trousers. Naturally, Beckanarm attended my first wedding. She wore a Roedean school dress from the 1950s, which she’d found in a charity shop. She accessorized it and looked amazing. After the ceremony and a meal in a pub I, my late first wife and Beckanarm, hopped on a bus back to our flat as she was staying with us.

Beckanarm’s career took her to Africa and the Middle East and she taught at Birmingham, Warwick, Oxford and London. She never seemed to age and looked very much the same in her forties as she did when I first met her at nineteen. Sadly we rarely saw each other in the final twenty years or so of her life. But I’m pleased to both recall her as a wonderful friend  and to celebrate the achievements of her extraordinary career.

Susan Beckerleg: 1954 – 2012

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Taking Time Out

Posted on 27/12/2021 by Bobby Seal

An old book, discarded for years and then picked up again, can be a potent reminder of a time, a place and a stage in your life, casting you straight back to the time when you first read it. I found it when I was sorting out a box of books recently. The perennial problem: too many books and not enough shelf space. The book I found was Time Out’s The Book of London. It is a narrow paperback of some 300 pages, densely printed in a tiny typeface on cheap, thin paper. The spine had split from over-use and many of the pages were loose. I carefully opened it and flicked through its pages. It smelled of 1973 and my mind instantly tumbled back to that era, to my youth.

Book Cover

I come from a working class family in which no one had ever been to university before. My mum was from Liverpool and my dad from Wales. They spent the first ten years or so of married life in London and my older brother was born there. Just before my birth, my dad’s father died and my parents decided to move to Wales to be near my newly-widowed grandmother.

My childhood, therefore, was spent in a small Welsh market town. But, from an early age, I was brought up on tales of my family’s time in London; the places, the characters and the events that were part of life in a big city. As I grew up I sensed the possibility of another life I might be leading, the exciting city-dwelling life which had been denied me.

This feeling strengthened when I entered my teens; I felt there was something missing, something that had been lost. With the judgemental dogmatism of youth I found my small town stifling and parochial and the concerns of most of my peers at school very limited. I had a small handful of friends and we would spend evenings in each other’s homes listening to albums. Later, from about the age of sixteen, we would go to gigs in Chester, Liverpool and Manchester and drink beer whenever we found a pub lax enough to serve us.

Throughout this time I fed my mind with books from the library by Thomas Hardy, the Brontës, Kurt Vonnegut, Hermann Hesse and others, I read the rock press assiduously and ordered alternative magazines like IT and Oz by mail whenever I could afford to pay for the postal order. My favourite though was Time Out. This was long before it became a global brand; it was the era when Time Out was a purely London listings magazine that wore its radical politics on its sleeve. My imagination was still beguiled by the lure of the big city.

inside K

inside OAlthough I didn’t particularly enjoy school, I did well in my ‘O’ levels and moved up to the sixth form. I decided at about this time that I wanted to go to university. This was mainly because it would delay the awful prospect of having to work in a mind-numbing job for forty years. This, of course, was the time when bright working-class kids were paid a generous grant to go to university.

I wanted to go somewhere where there was a lively music scene, diverse people to meet, museums, galleries, theatres and interesting places to explore. For me that could only be one place, one city, and that was London.

I did OK in my ‘A’ levels and was predicted fairly good grades. So, by early 1973, I had an offer of a place at university in London and the promise of a full grant. Round about the same time, at a bookshop in Chester, I picked up a copy of Time Out’s The Book of London, the same one that is sitting on my desk now as I write.

inside TI devoured this book, reading it from cover to cover, again and again. I read it in my bedroom at home, on the bus and in the canteen at the steelworks where I laboured that summer. It was the book with which I plotted my escape from, as I saw it, small town mundanity to the cultural cutting edge of the big city.

 

London did not disappoint; I had a wonderful time. I’m not particularly good at meeting new people, but was lucky enough to fall in with a great bunch of new friends from the off. I lived the kind of big city life I was hoping for, enjoying its possibilities to the full. But I do not actually recall ever opening The Book of London again. Its joy as a book was in the anticipation of the reality.

 

The Book of London
Time Out (Publishers) Ltd
1973
80 pence
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Psychogeographic Review’s Books of the Year, 2021

Posted on 11/12/2021 by Bobby Seal

This year’s selection, presented in no particular order:

Book_CoverNotes From an Island by Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pietilä                                                       Finland

In 1963 Tove Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä set up their summer home on Klovharun, an almost barren outcrop of rock in the Gulf of Finland.  The two women then spend the next 26 summers on Klovharun: writing, painting, fishing and simply contemplating the sea, sky and local wildlife. They only left when they eventually became too old and frail to cope with the challenges of island life. This new English translation, by Thomas Teal, tells the story of their time there.

Book_CoverGhost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay by Jeff Young                                                                    Liverpool

Liverpool is a city populated by ghosts. Jeff Young evokes people, buildings and whole streets that are long gone but which still exist in shadow form. Liverpool is a radically different city from that of the 1970s, but its ghosts still inform the city’s character. Ghost Town is not just something written by Young; it is, in the truest sense, part of him. He and his ghosts inhabit every page. Open it up and smell the diesel fumes from a Crosville bus, hear the lowing of ships’ horns on the Mersey, taste the bitterness Higson’s ale and run your fingers over the yellowing coarseness of the pages of a second-hand paperback from the comic shop on Moorfields.

Book_CoverWestering: Footways and folkways from Norfolk to the Welsh coast by Laurence Mitchell    England and Wales

Westering is an account of Laurence Mitchell’s journey on foot from the North Sea coast at Great Yarmouth across the waistline of England and then Wales to end up at the shore of the Irish Sea at Aberystwyth. Mitchell describes his journey in a quiet, understated way but the effect is, nonetheless, profound. By focussing on small details, examining forgotten, liminal places, he is able to reflect on broader themes, such as belonging and loss.

 

Book_CoverThe White Birch: A Russian Reflection by Tom Jeffreys                                                                          Russia

The birch tree is the unofficial national emblem of Russia and is a ubiquitous presence throughout that nation’s forests. For Tom Jeffreys it is the birch, and in particular the white birch, that he employs to get a handle on the nature of what it is to be Russian. Jeffreys travels across Russia, from the Finnish border to Vladivostok on Russia’s Pacific coast, and everywhere he goes he finds birch trees from one species or another of the genus Betula. With The White Birch, Jeffreys has discovered his own very unique voice and produced a work that is both profound and beautifully written.

Book_CoverWhy the Germans Do It Better: Notes From a Grown-Up Country by John Kampfner        Germany

Why the Germans Do it Better is a work of meticulous research and sober analysis; a well-written overview of post-war German history. This book is as much a book about Britain as it is about Germany. Kampfner does not lecture his readers: we are left to draw our own conclusions. But present-day Britain does not compare well with our neighbours from across the North Sea. Germany is indeed a grown-up country, one that has come to be at peace with its past and comfortable with its role in Europe. Whereas Britain, he suggests, is trapped in the past and swayed by a fantasy world of imperial power

I Belong HereI Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain by Anita Sethi                                                Northern England

All too often people of colour are made to feel that they do not belong in England’s countryside; that it is a place that is not for ‘people like them’. Anita Sethi was forced to confront this corrosive notion when she was subjected to a sustained attack of racial abuse and hatred on a busy train between Liverpool and Newcastle in 2019. She  sought to heal the wounds of the incident by going out into the wilds and walking. She sensed, almost instinctively, that there was healing to be found in the landscape. The long-distance walk that Sethi decided upon, as a woman from the North, was a journey along the northern backbone of England: the Pennines.

Book_CoverGreat Master / small boy – by Liz Lefroy  Germany and Austria

This new collection of poems by Liz Lefroy is inspired by a trip she and her son took in 2018.  It comprises a series of short, linked pieces describing their journey to present-day Bonn and Vienna looking for echoes of Beethoven’s life in both cities. For Liz this was also a temporal journey, a very personal one, casting her mind’s ear and eye back to her childhood and memories of her mother, a talented pianist.

Book_CoverChildhood, Youth, Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen  Copenhagen         

The three volumes of the Danish poet’s autobiography are now published together in an English translation for the first time. Tove Ditlevsen tells the story of her journey from childhood poverty, through the negative attitudes towards creative women of most of the men she encounters, to finally becoming one of Denmark’s foremost poets of the twentieth century. She speaks candidly about her struggles with mental health and addiction.

 

Book_CoverThe Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness by Patrick Wright                                Germany, New York and Sheerness

It may at first seem puzzling that Uwe Johnson, one of Germany’s most accomplished writers of the twentieth century, should spend the final ten years of his life in Sheerness on Kent’s Isle of Sheppey. But having lived out  his childhood and young adult years on Germany’s Baltic coast, this low-lying island in the Thames estuary, a bleak and windswept place, must have seemed uncannily familiar. Patrick Wright has produced a work  concentrating on the last ten years of Johnson’s life. It is also a book, a very detailed book, about Sheerness. Wright’s deep-dive research is evident on almost page.

Book_CoverKlara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro                           The Future

Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel is set in a not too distant dystopian future. Klara is an Artificial Friend recruited as companion to a teenage girl with severe health problems. We see the world, which could so easily be our own, through Klara’s eyes, gaining insights from her acute observational skills. Ishiguro creates a believable and fully-realised alternative world and uses it to explore ideas of love, loss and the the very nature of consciousness.

 

Book_CoverHeavy Time: A Psychogeographer’s Pilgrimage by Sonia Overall                                                                 England

From Sonia Overall’s idea of making her own pilgrimage, the journey chronicled in Heavy Time, was born. But this is not a traditional pilgrimage seeking ‘miracles’, she was instead ‘on the psychogeographical scent, a hunter of spirits of place.’ Overall’s plan was to take the old pilgrims’ way from Canterbury to Southwark cathedral, reversing the route followed by Chaucer’s travellers. From London she planned to walk to Ely: a journey back into her childhood. From here her walk would continue to Walsingham, a place with particular significance for Overall and the destination of many a medieval pilgrim.

Book_CoverBuried Garden: Lockdown with the Lost Poets of Abney Park Cemetery by Chris McCabe               London

Buried Garden is the fourth volume of Chris McCabe’s exploration of the so-called lost poets of London’s Victorian cemeteries. This book is an attempt to unearth, in a literary sense, the forgotten poets buried beneath the soil of Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington. But there is, suggests McCabe, another garden at Abney Park: a garden of the imagination, or perhaps even one existing in an alternative reality. Arthur Machen’s secret garden of Stoke Newington constantly infiltrates its way into McCabe’s researches and his wanderings.

Book_CoverExcavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall by Tessa Norton & Bob Stanley         Prestwich

Edited by Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley, this weighty collection contains essays, artwork and photographs charting the career of Mark E Smith and The Fall. They were, of course, music’s perennial contrarians and outsiders. But this volume is far more than another rock biography or an expanded fanzine. Excavate! provides a lens through which to view an alternative history of Britain over the last forty years.

 

Most of the books recommended above are more extensively reviewed elsewhere in this blog.

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Westering: Footways and folkways from Norfolk to the Welsh coast by Laurence Mitchell

Posted on 07/12/2021 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – December 2021

The idea was to drift west, to etch a furrow in the map of England and Wales. My plan was to walk coast to coast across the country with some sort of agenda, to follow a dreamed-up route that started in East Anglia and headed west until it reached the Welsh coast.

coverWestering is an account of Laurence Mitchell’s journey on foot from the North Sea coast at Great Yarmouth across the waistline of England and then Wales to end up at the shore of the Irish Sea at Aberystwyth.

Mitchell’s book is rich with detail about the landscape he observes as he walks and his prose gives a real sense of moving at walking pace, noticing every detail. Westering is dense with information about the history, topography, wildlife and economy of the places he passes through. It was not surprising to learn that Mitchell was once a geography teacher. I imagine that, judging by his skill as a storyteller and his enthusiasm for his subject matter, he was quite an inspiring teacher too.

As I read Westering, I found myself puzzling about how Mitchell managed to accumulate so much precise detail of his journey: he points out almost every bridge, every stream, every stand of trees along the way. Does he have a photographic memory, or does he stop to make notes every hundred metres or so? Or perhaps he dictates into his phone as he walks? The answer was provided on page 126 when he mentioned how the howl of Fenland wind overwhelmed the playback on his recording device.

Mitchell’s writing is not inclined to some of the outer limits of literary experimentation. Instead he writes in the clear, engaging style of the better kind of travel writer, which in fact is now his second career after leaving teaching. Westering is a journey and Mitchell takes the reader along like the perfect travelling companion. In the early days of the walk he tells us the basic facts about himself and shares his knowledge of the landscape we are moving through. Later, once we have got to know him a little better, he opens up and shares a lot more about himself.

For Mitchell, walking is a form of therapy; it is his way of dealing with the ups and downs of his mood:

It was a dreary, grey day with a dimpled canopy of cloud weighing heavy over the Fens, a match for the gloomy frame of mind I seemed to have woken up with. It was a mood I was more accustomed to experiencing in winter but there was never any way of knowing when the black dog might pay a visit.

For practical reasons, Mitchell approaches much of the earlier part of his journey as a series of day walks, returning by public transport back to his home in Norwich each evening and then resuming the walk where he left off later, sometimes several days later. This is understandable; after a day’s lone walking I imagine it is nice to discuss the day’s events with his wife and then sleep in his own bed. This also allowed him to carry on with other work and other activities. But I did find that it broke up the momentum of the story of his walk a little; that it detracted from the sense of being on a continuous journey.

Black Country

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Westering truly comes alive when Mitchell reaches the West Midlands, the region where he spent his childhood and youth. The area is redolent with memories and echoes of his past: family, school, friends, music, college and football. He laments streets and factories that are no longer there: a way of life now gone.

It was here that my mother grew up in a terraced house on Rann Street with her parents and aunt. The street has vanished from the map, bulldozed to clear the way for high-rise development in the 1960s – housing that grew unfit for purpose well before its allotted time.

From Birmingham, Mitchell continues through the Black Country and into Shropshire. Winter is approaching as he reaches the Welsh border, so he returns home and does not resume his journey until the following spring. He ends his quest on the beach at Aberystwyth and reflects on the journey that has brought him here, all the way from another coast on the far side of another country.

Mitchell describes this journey in a quiet, understated way but the effect is, nonetheless, profound. By focussing on small details, examining forgotten, liminal places, he is able to reflect on broader themes, such as belonging and loss. The final few pages are ineffably moving as Mitchell places a pebble he picked up at Great Yarmouth on Aberystwyth beach and gazes out at the waves.

To stare out to sea is always a reminder of that which is lost. Despite the ‘nothing to see here’ frivolity of the waves, the vast heaving skin of grey water puts us in mind of losses and absences.

Laurence Mitchell

AuthorLaurence Mitchell is a travel writer with a strong interest in walking, wildlife, landscape and local history. As well as a number of travel guidebooks and walking guides he has also written features for magazines like Geographical, Walk and Discovering Britain, and is a regular guest writer for the Berlin-based magazine Hidden Europe.

 

Westering: Footways and folkways from Norfolk to the Welsh coast
Laurence Mitchell
Saraband
April 2021
UK – £9.99 (paperback)
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Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay by Jeff Young

Posted on 02/12/2021 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – December 2021

I go to the pubs where Allen Ginsberg drank with Adrian Henri in May 1965 when he declared Liverpool to be ‘at the present moment, the centre of consciousness of the human universe’. I walk past the building on Hardman Street where Atticus Books relocated, and where William Burroughs signed copies of his novels in 1982. I see Bob Dylan in 1966, hanging out with street kids in the doorway of a derelict warehouse on Dublin Street. I glimpse Arthur Rimbaud, wandering through the city in 1876, on his way from Cork to Le Havre after absconding from the Dutch Army.

I feel an affinity with Jeff Young’s Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay. My mother was from Liverpool, one of six sisters from Walton. This meant that, as a child, although I lived elsewhere, I frequently visited Liverpool and felt part of a ready-made clan of Scouse aunts, uncles and cousins. So, like Young, the Liverpool of the 1960s haunts my memories of childhood and the city of the 1970s still stalks my teenage recollections.

Young’s Liverpool is a city populated by ghosts. He evokes people, buildings and whole streets that are long gone but which still exist in shadow form. Liverpool is a radically different city from that of the 1970s, but its ghosts still inform the city’s character. I recall Niall Griffiths, the Liverpool/Welsh writer, saying that, to understand Liverpool, you have to remember that it is a Celtic city and that its unique blend of exuberance and melancholy comes from the twin Irish and Welsh influence. With Ghost Town Young succeeds in capturing this mood: he laments the Liverpool that has been lost, but at the same time celebrates its memory and the legacy it has left us.

Young’s first home was in inner-city Liverpool, near to the Everton FC football ground. His grandparents and other members of his extended family lived all around. Then, while he was still a child, the family moved to a house on a new estate on the outskirts of the city. Young’s new home had a bathroom, he had his own bedroom and in this rural demi-paradise the fields, woods and canal were his playground. Meanwhile the old centre of Liverpool was fast disappearing: much of what the Luftwaffe had failed to destroy was demolished by the city planners in the 1960s.

School in Young’s Liverpool suburb failed to engage him and he seemed destined for a dead-end factory or office job. Having discovered Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave, he found himself increasingly identifying with the book’s protagonist, Billy Casper. Few of Young’s teachers took any interest in him or offered encouragement, but:

The only good teacher I ever had was an art teacher who wore a kipper tie and found two treasures in a gutter. The first was a rain-soaked record, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, which he played us one day in art class…. while the art teacher read to us from his second gutter treasure: a paperback copy of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Discovering Kafka was an important step in Young’s own metamorphosis into becoming a writer. He left school with few qualifications and ended up in a stultifyingly tedious job as a filing-clerk with the local council.  Lonely and directionless, the teenage Young drew solace from art, music and fiction. He found comfort and inspiration in the works of outsider artists such as William Burroughs, Mark E Smith, David Bowie, Alan Garner and the films of Terence Davies; works that intersperse melancholy, longing, a sense of loss and occasional joy.

Young found himself drawn back to the streets of the city in which he was born. He would sit alone in pubs like The Vines and Yates’s Wine Lodge, drinking, smoking and reading his latest paperback.  Liverpool was the place he went to see bands, buy records, pick up art materials and mooch around the second-hand bookshops. The musty old paperbacks he picked up for a few pennies were Young’s education and his escape. More than anything, however, Liverpool was the place where he walked and looked, imprinting the city’s streets and buildings deep into his psyche.

It was Young’s mother who encouraged his love of Liverpool and its buildings; finding out what lies behind a building’s anonymous façade, discovering the history that is mapped out in the city’s streets. As a child, a trip into town with his mother would involve frequent diversions into alleyways, through doorways and up staircases. Her habit of ‘having a nose’, as she put it, was something which stayed with Young for life. He become the outsider constantly looking in, but at the same time developed into someone who was deeply embedded within the city he loved and to which he belonged.

The great achievement of Ghost Town is the way Young weaves in his own story and that of his family with the story of Liverpool. Personal memories, folk memories and dreams merge together; the streetscape of the old city is, in Young’s mind,  superimposed upon that of  modern Liverpool. In the shadows the city of the sixties, seventies and earlier still exists.

Ghost Town is not just something written by Jeff Young; it is, in the truest sense, part of him. He and his ghosts inhabit every page. Open it up and smell the diesel fumes from a Crosville bus, hear the lowing of ships’ horns on the Mersey, taste the bitterness Higson’s ale and run your fingers over the yellowing coarseness of the pages of a second-hand paperback from the comic shop on Moorfields. In Ghost Town we are shown Liverpool through Young’s eyes while he, in turn, looks at it it through the vision of those who came before him:

My mother taught me Liverpool; she was the guide into its shadows, into the hidden and forgotten. When I walk through Liverpool, and when I write and talk about it, I summon up my mother and try to see it through her eyes. I have used my blind grandfather in the same way, have tried to see the city through his blindness, to try to feel what he must have felt when the city he knew was being demolished.

Jeff Young

Jeff Young is a writer for theatre, radio and screen whose TV credits include Eastenders, Holby City, CBBC and Casualty. He broadcasts essays for Radio 3, collaborates with artists and musicians on sound art installations and has worked on many arts projects in Liverpool and elsewhere, including a residency in Bill Drummond’s Curfew Tower. He is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the Screen School of Liverpool John Moores University.

Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay
Jeff Young
Little Toller
2020
UK – £12.00 (paperback)
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Notes From an Island by Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pietilä

Posted on 11/11/2021 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – November 2021

We dreamed about what our new cabin would look like. The room would have four windows, one in each wall. Towards the south-east we’d need to see the big storms that rage right across the island, on the east we’d see the moon’s reflection in the lagoon, and on the west side a rock face with moss and polypody ferns. To the north, we’ll keep watch for approaching boats so we’ll have time to get ready…

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In 1963 Tove Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä set up their summer home on Klovharun, an almost barren outcrop of rock in the Gulf of Finland. With the help of Brunström, a local fisherman, and Jansson’s mother, Ham, they spent their first summer on the island building a log cabin that would be strong enough to survive the harsh Finnish winter. The two women then spent the next 26 summers on Klovharun: writing, painting, fishing and simply contemplating the sea, sky and local wildlife. They only left when they eventually became too old and frail to cope with the challenges of island life. This new English translation, by Thomas Teal, tells the story of their time on the island.

Klovharun

Klovharun

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tove Jansson is best known as the author of the Moomin series of children’s stories. She also wrote for adults including The Summer Book, a fictionalised version of life on an island like Klovharun. Tuulikki Pietilä (‘Tooti’) was a talented artist and lecturer with a very useful (on the island) affinity for tools and anything mechanical. Notes From an Island comprises Jansson’s prose and extracts from a logbook donated to her by Brunström. The book also features 24 exquisite copperplate etchings and wash drawings of Klovharun by Tooti.

Tuulikki Pietilä - 1976

Tuulikki Pietilä – 1976

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Tooti wandered aimlessly around the island and stood stock still for long periods. I thought I knew what she was doing. She was working again. Copperplate etchings and wash drawings. Mostly the lagoon, the lagoon as a consummate mirror for clouds and birds, the lagoon in a storm, in fog. And the granite, first and foremost, the granite, the cliff, the rocks. It’s all peace and quiet now.

Life on the island is physically demanding, but is satisfying in its simplicity. Their daily routine revolves around keeping their small boat seaworthy, chopping driftwood for fuel, fishing for food and keeping the generator running for power. However, attitudes to the environment are very much of their time: rubbish and unwanted items are simply dumped in the sea, for example.

With each autumn Tove and Tooti would secure their house against the Baltic winter before returning to life on the mainland. They never locked their cabin; the local etiquette was that winter visitors to these small islands were free to borrow and use any item they needed. Unfortunately, however, Tove and Tooti found that many of these ‘borrowed’ items were never returned. But the sea was a much bigger challenge. After their first winter they returned to Klovharun to find that a winter storm had swept through their newly-built wood store and taken back every carefully chopped and stacked piece of driftwood.

But the island gives far more than it takes. Both artists found that its quiet, meditative quality was a perfect location for working on their creative projects. Ultimately though, this is a story of love: the love of two women for nature, for the sea, for their art, for each other and the home they built together.

Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson (1914–2001) is best known as the creator of the Moomin stories, which were first published in English sixty years ago and have remained in print ever since. In her fifties, Jansson turned her attention to writing for adults, producing a dozen novels and story collections, including the classic, bestselling The Summer Book.

 

Tuulikki Pietilä

Tuulikki Pietilä (1917–2009), Tove Jansson’s life partner, was a Finnish graphic artist and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Together they collaborated on many art projects, and the Moomin characters had a significant role in Pietilä’s work as an artist.

 

Notes From an Island
Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pietilä
Sort of Books
1996 – published in Swedish
2021 – English translation
UK – £12.99 (hardback)
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Midges, Maps & Muesli by Helen Krasner

Posted on 01/11/2021 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – November 2021

I met Helen Krasner briefly many years ago, not long after she had completed her epic walk around the coastline of Britain, which she talked about, but several years  before she published her account of that journey: Midges, Maps & Muesli. By a stroke of serendipity I recently found a copy of this 1998 book in a local secondhand shop.

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I hadn’t done more than the occasional stroll for years. So it seemed sensible to do some weekend hikes, at least. In fact, against my own happy-go-lucky inclinations, I decided to do some Serious Training. But somehow it never actually took place.

In 1986 Helen Krasner made a journey on foot around the coastline of Great Britain, starting and finishing in Brighton and covering nearly 5,000 miles. Her sole objective was to complete the walk and have fun doing so; she had no interest in setting records nor in becoming a celebrity. Looking back on her achievement, the amazing thing is that she did so as a slightly-built lone woman with no back-up team, very little planning and a limited budget. Also, this being the 1980s, she did it without the benefit of a smart phone and access to the internet.

Helen’s journey presents her with plenty of setbacks, which she eventually  overcomes. She also encounters lots of kind, helpful people and a few unpleasant ones. Throughout it all she seems to deal with whatever comes her way with humour and good grace.

Midges, Maps & Muesli is a book that is very much of its time and serves to emphasise how much landscape writing has changed in the last twenty years or so. There are no asides, no dwelling on memories or embracing sensory associations and no stream of consciousness musings. Helen describes her journey in a very plain, somewhat traditional style. There is very little in the way of psychological insight – we learn almost nothing about her inner journey. Nor does she offer up detailed descriptions of the places she passes through and not very much at all about the landscape and its history. Instead Helen concentrates on recounting her daily mileage, her occasional difficulties with navigation and how she manages to find food and accommodation for her overnight stays.

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Yet this journey clearly had a profound effect upon her. When we met through work a few years afterwards she spoke about it and then, a full twelve years after the walk, she published this book. Looking at Helen’s current website, she still gives prominence to her long-distance walk; which, of course, is fair enough given it was such a profound achievement.

The book includes a few rather muddy black and white photographs Helen took along the way. There is also an appendix with a helpful chart with her daily route and mileage. What is missing though, I feel, is a map of her route.

Finally, in January 1987, Helen arrives back in Brighton. She is greeted by a small crowd and the local press and radio. In customary fashion, however, she downplays the whole event:

I think I annoyed everyone by telling the absolute truth, even though it wasn’t what they expected and didn’t make a particularly good story. For actually the truth was very mundane—I felt fine, but not particularly ecstatic or outrageously happy; my feet didn’t hurt at all, and I’d put on weight, not lost it. I didn’t manage any memorable quotes or really give them that much to write about or broadcast. And I didn’t paddle in the sea. It was no good; I just didn’t live up to everyone’s image of a long distance walker; in spite of everything I was far too ordinary.

While writing this review I also read the 2015 e-book version. It contains an additional chapter charting Helen’s life in the decades since she completed her walk. Her story’s twists and turns includes a few difficult times and surprises but, ultimately, is very uplifting.

 

Helen Krasner

Author

Helen Krasner was until recently a rotary commercial pilot and worked for many years as a helicopter instructor. She combined this with her love of writing, having had work published in a number of aviation journals as well as several books about her travels. In 2004 she was nominated for an Aerospace Journalist of the Year award.

Midges, Maps and Muesli
Helen Krasner
Garth Publications
1998
UK – £7.99 (paperback)
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The White Birch: A Russian Reflection by Tom Jeffreys

Posted on 31/10/2021 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – November 2021

It has been hand-planted by Tsarinas and felled by foresters. It has been celebrated by peasants, worshipped by pagans and painted by artists. It has self-seeded across mountains and rivers and train tracks and steppe and right through the ruined modernity of a nuclear fall-out site. And like all symbols, the story of the birch has its share of horrors (white, straight, native, pure: how could it not?). But, maybe in the end, what I’m really in search of is a birch that means nothing: stripped of symbolism, bereft of use-value . . . A birch that is simply a tree in a land that couldn’t give a shit.

Book Cover

 

The birch tree is the unofficial national emblem of Russia and is a ubiquitous presence throughout that nation’s forests. For Tom Jeffreys it is the birch, and in particular the white birch, that he tries to use to get a handle on the nature of what it is to be Russian. Jeffreys travels across Russia, from the Finnish border to Vladivostok on Russia’s Pacific coast, and everywhere he goes he finds birch trees from one species or another of the genus Betula.

But it is not just the physical presence of this species that he examines, it is much more the powerful hold that the birch tree has on the Russian psyche. A key part of this mindset is the place of the birch in Russian art and, as a specialist writer on art, Jeffreys examines this at length. The White Birch has a handful of black and white illustrations, but otherwise Jeffreys faces the perennial art writer’s problem of discussing paintings that the reader cannot see. That said, he shows considerable skill in rising to this challenge and is able to bring alive some of the key works in Russian landscape painting.

Most of this is not great art, Jeffreys suggests, but what it represents is still central to the Russian identity. For Russians the most famous and popular of these works is The Rooks Have Returned by Alexei Savrasov, the meaning of which generations of Russian schoolchildren have been required to write at least one essay about.

The Rooks Have Returned

Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov: The Rooks Have Returned, 1871. Courtesy: Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The birch is a pioneer species; it colonises newly broken ground, puts down deep roots and brings long-dormant minerals to the surface, thereby encouraging other vegetation and other, more substantial, trees to move in. The bark of the birch tree has many uses: a substitute for paper and leather, dressings for wounds and, when boiled down to a rich tar, a weatherproof coating for wood. Birch sap can be used in a variety of foods and drinks and the wood of the tree for building and for fuel.

As a symbol, the birch has been claimed by both dictators and protestors in Russia. Campaigners against a new Moscow to St Petersburg fought for several years to protect swathes of ancient birch woodland to the north of the capital. They were subjected to surveillance by the FSB and violence from hired thugs, while the local police just looked on. The protesters were at least partially successful when President Medvedev suspended the project in 2010 to consider other options.

Levitan

Isaac Levitan, Spring, High Water, 1897, oil on canvas, 64 × 57 cm. Courtesy: Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jeffreys travels take him to Catherine the Great’s garden, a drunken dinner with Pussy Riot activists in Moscow and on an epic journey by train into Siberia. As he travels he considers the idea of Mother Russia, a nation that is feminine in its character. But, we learn, the related concept of ‘eternal Russia’ is somewhat misleading; Russia as a nation only emerged in the last few centuries. Before that these lands were populated by a host of different tribes and peoples. Among these were the Rus, after whom Russia was named. But for millions of years, before all of these peoples arrived, the birch tree has occupied these lands.

Jeffreys previous book, Signal Failure, was about the environmental and economic folly of the HS2 project and involved him taking a journey by foot along the proposed route. It was not a bad book. In fact it was impressively researched and very well written. However, in my admittedly very personal opinion, it was a book that could have been written by any one of several other authors. But, with The White Birch, Jeffreys has discovered his own very unique voice and produced a work that is both profound and beautifully written.

 

Tom Jeffreys

AuthorTom Jeffreys is a writer based in Edinburgh. His work has been published in magazines, newspapers and websites like art-agenda, ArtReview, Apollo, Country Walking, Cricinfo, Finnish Architectural Review, Frieze, The Independent, Monocle, New Scientist, and The World of Interiors. Jeffreys is the editor of the online magazine The Learned Pig. He is the author of two books: The White Birch: A Russian Reflection (Little, Brown, 2021) and Signal Failure: London to Birmingham, HS2 on Foot (Influx Press, 2017).

 

The White Birch: A Russian Reflection
Tom Jeffreys
Little, Brown
June 2021 
UK – £16.99 (hardback)
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Buried Garden: Lockdown With The Lost Poets Of Abney Park Cemetery, by Chris McCabe

Posted on 22/10/2021 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – Halloween 2021

Buried Garden is the fourth volume of Chris McCabe’s exploration of the so-called lost poets of London’s Victorian cemeteries. These burial places, now known as the Magnificent Seven, were established on greenfield sites on the edges of an ever-expanding nineteenth-century London in a bid to relieve the overcrowding of the capital’s inner-city churchyards and to house its growing army of the dead.

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This book, published appropriately enough on the day of Halloween, is an attempt to unearth, in a literary sense, the forgotten poets buried beneath the soil of Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington. Other volumes, three already published and another three yet to come, delve beneath the earth of the cemeteries at West Norwood, Nunhead, Tower Hamlets, Highgate, Kensal Green and Brompton.

mapAbney Park is the buried garden of the title. Like so many other cemeteries of this era it was once an immaculately-tended garden with flowers, lawns and trees, all providing a suitable backdrop for the memorial stones of Victorian certainty. Now, as with many others, it has become an overgrown tangle; perhaps not an entirely neglected space, but certainly one where nature has been allowed to reclaim her own. It is a place frequented by dog walkers, contemplative wanderers, dogged joggers, al fresco drinkers and unreformed lurkers.

To stand at the gates of Abney Park Cemetery is to stare through a portal into the afterlife. People walk past here all the time, missing the gateway.

But there is, suggests Chris McCabe, another garden at Abney Park: a garden of the imagination, or perhaps even one existing in an alternative reality. Arthur Machen’s secret garden of Stoke Newington, as described in his story N, constantly infiltrates its way into McCabe’s researches and his wanderings through the cemetery. This notion of a hidden garden constantly disorientates, disturbs and excites McCabe’s consciousness as he explores Abney Park and leads him to speculate that it may well be the location of Machen’s visionary oasis. Whether this garden is an actual physical space or, perhaps, the site of a portal through to another location is left for the reader to decide.

McCabe conducted his field research earlier this year just as the restrictions of the second English lockdown were being eased. Other people may have taken the lifting of travel and mixing restrictions as a chance to visit friends and family or check in at their place of work. For McCabe, however, it was the opportunity to take a train from his home in Liverpool to spend time wandering around a cemetery in North London.

But who are the lost poets, and why are some writers from this era still remembered and others, often widely celebrated at the time, now all but forgotten? McCabe locates and ponders over the graves of several writers who fit into the latter category, among them George and Isabella Varley Banks, Rev. Dr. Hibbert Newton, Josiah Conder, Thomas William Robertson, Dr. Alexander Japp, Alice R. Cron, William Hone, Rev. Thomas Toke Lynch, Eric Walrond and Emily Bowes Gosse.

Bowes Gosse is an interesting example of a once revered but now lost poet. She was something of a polymath: a landscape painter, poet and author of gospel tracts. Her posthumously published Narrative Tracts (1864) was distributed to over 7 million readers, yet it is her evolution-denying naturalist husband, Philip Gosse, who is the better remembered. Indeed, when McCabe finally finds the ivy-strewn Gosse gravestone the only discernible reference to Emily on it is the inscription: ALSO HIS WIFE.

Isabella Varley Banks, McCabe discovers, is also buried at Abney Park. She is still remembered as the author of political novels and as a campaigner for the Anti-Corn Law League. Indeed, I was easily able to obtain a secondhand copy of her best known novel, The Manchester Man, while working on this piece. Yet, although Varley Banks was a widely-read poet in her day, she is now rarely remembered for her verse.

Less than a year after George Floyd was  publicly executed in a Minneapolis street for allegedly passing a counterfeit banknote, McCabe located the grave of Guyana-born journalist Eric Walrond in Abney Park. Although he passed away as recently as 1966, Walrond’s poetry is forgotten and long out of print. However, his highly-rated short story collection, Tropic Death, is still available. Reading this work, McCabe is taken aback to discover ‘startling metaphors, personification, assonance, alliteration, anaphora’. Indeed, the techniques of a potential poet.

McCabe has set out to create an ambitious and important body of work with these seven volumes and I look forward to reading the remaining three. The latest, Buried Garden, is deeply researched  and wide-ranging in its vision. McCabe writes with energy and verve and manages to effortlessly blend academic research, reportage, speculative fiction, poetry, dreams and fragments of found fiction.

I still say Abney Park Cemetery is Stoke Newington’s paradise garden, just as Machen describes it in N. What some people have described as madness can just as easily be explained as poetry.

So why are some poets remembered and others forgotten? There certainly seems to be a gender bias in who is admitted to the poetic canon. Our society happily celebrates male genius while talented women are often ignored. Looking at the examples of verse from the (mainly male) poets that McCabe unearths, however, it is not hard to see why some of them are best forgotten. He is yet to turn up a neglected Tennyson, Hopkins or Yeats.  Ultimately I suspect we will not have a definitive idea of who might be London’s great lost poet until the end of McCabe’s seventh and final volume.

 

Chris McCabe

McCabeChris McCabe’s work spans artforms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. His work has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. His latest poetry collection, The Triumph of Cancer, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and he is the editor of several anthologies including Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages. His first novel, Dedalus, is a sequel to Ulysses; his second, Mud, a version of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, set beneath Hampstead Heath. He works at the National Poetry Library as the National Poetry Librarian.

Buried Garden: Lockdown With The Lost Poets Of Abney Park Cemetery
Chris McCabe
Penned in the Margins
31 October 2021 
UK – £9.99 (paperback)
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A Dill Pickle

Posted on 14/10/2021 by Bobby Seal

This piece is taken from a longer review of the short stories of Katherine Mansfield which I published in 2013. It was used by the composer, Matt Malsky, as the programme notes for his chamber opera, A Dill Pickle, which was premiered at the Jean McDonough Arts Center in Worcester Massachusetts on Sunday 10th October 2021.

A Dill Pickle explores the subject of the power relationships between men and women. Vera and the unnamed male protagonist of the story were once lovers. After a six year hiatus they meet again in a café; whether by chance or arrangement we are not told. A Dill Pickle is typical of many of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories in that it seems to start in the middle; the reader is not told what happened before the story starts, nor what comes after. Although the story is told from Vera’s viewpoint, we learn very little about her. The man, on the other hand, although un-named, provides a great deal of detail about himself.

 

Vera and her former lover reminisce about the time they spent together. He has clearly prospered since the end of their relationship:

Now he had the air of a man who has found his place in life, and fills it with a confidence and assurance which was, to say the least, impressive. He must have made money, too. His clothes were admirable, and at that moment he pulled a Russian cigarette case out of his pocket.

Vera, on the other hand has gone down in the world since they parted; her beloved piano has gone: ‘sold, ages ago’, and she no longer has time for music. As a woman alone in a male society, a woman with a past, she struggles to make a living. With only thinly disguised glee, he highlights the power imbalance that prosperity has created between them. She fascinates him still, but he is no longer in her thrall. He makes a point of reminding her of the letter she wrote to him at the end of their relationship:

I’ve often thought how I must have bored you. And now I understand so perfectly why you wrote to me as you did – although at the time that letter nearly finished my life. I found it again the other day, and I couldn’t help laughing as I read it. It was so clever – such a true picture of me.

With carefully chosen anecdotes, he parades a world of travel and the fine things of life before Vera. He confesses he was ‘such a kid’ before, but now he seeks to impress her with the wisdom and sophistication he has gained. Vera is tempted, but the balance of power between them has clearly shifted. She leaves swiftly and without a word, as if trying to snatch at some last remnant of her dignity. Although the man’s crushing sense of his own self-importance is made clear, Mansfield also suggests a hint of egotism on Vera’s part too. In a moment of epiphany she suddenly realises that her former lover, although he is clearly vain and self-opinionated, understands her far better than she understands herself.

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