Category: About Writing

‘Testament of Youth’ …

By Vera Brittain, first published in 1933, and with a long publishing history thereafter, has kept me reading for over a week.

This is not a book review in the formal sense as I’m sure thousands of those have been written over the ninety-one years of existence of this … what we nowadays might call a memoir. (If I understand correctly that such a thing is an autobiographical account of a period of time)

Vera Brittain was of the same generation as my grandparents, who all four were also born in the 1880s to 1890s. Brittain was born in the provincial middle class hinterland of what is now the UK, my grandparents were born and raised in the provincial middleclass hinterland in the Netherlands.

There the comparison ends, for neither of my grandmothers were rebels, and due to their nation’s neutrality, they did not experience the 1914-1918 years in the same way as most other people in Europe.

According to the histories I’ve read, it suited the powers surrounding the Netherlands to allow that nation’s neutrality to continue through the whole of the war, for their convenience.

While German troops crossed and recrossed Dutch territories at will, millions of Belgian refugees made their homes in the Netherlands through the war. Coal and other minerals from the Dutch colonies warmed British homes and kept factories going.

But there was no historical, personal detail from the four families, how they were affected by the fighting on their very doorsteps, they surely would’ve been close enough to hear the guns in Belgium?

And while I’ve read a few historical novels about the Great War, I’d never read an account written from a woman’s point of view. So ‘seized’ the opportunity.

The first most noticeable thing reading a book written in the 1920s is the brand of tortured English. Well, I’m calling it that.

There are always ten words where we, nowadays, can make ourselves understood with a mere five or six. All ten, or however many there are, of the English language’s verb tenses get a good work-out.

It’s noticeable in Brittain’s account when a noun is unadorned by one or two adjectives or a verb with at least one adverb. It feels bare then. Most sentences have more than thirty words. It’s exceedingly verbose and towards the end I skipped many half page paragraphs.

Why did I even keep going, you’ll be wondering? Brittain’s experiences during the war and her incredible, through thick and thin, correspondences with her lover, her brother and two friends of theirs until they died, either in action or after being wounded is the real story here.

How the Army kept the postal service going to all areas of the front would make an amazing read. The logistics to keep that going boggles my mind.

It’s astounding, the numbers of letters written by soldiers at war, sent, and received by relatives if Vera Brittain’s experiences are anything to go by. At one point she mentions that there were daily letters or postcards or even brief notes from men stuck in the trenches.

Brittain’s own experiences as a war nurse, working in hospitals right next to various battle fronts, where they triaged men with horrific wounds make you thankful to live now. I learned more about mustard gas than I knew. More about infection when there were no antibiotics. About gangrene. About … Medicine has come a long way in a hundred years.

I understand there have been a film and TV series made. If I’d seen the film first, I’d probably not bother to read the book. It is quite heavy going. But then I wouldn’t have read the rain of little diamonds sprinkled throughout the text. The words and images that I will treasure.

Such as when Vera visits first Roland’s grave and a few years later her brother’s grave. On the way there so many broken tree-trunks lay along the road bearing witness, that only the Omniscient Mmathmatician could count them.

There was a great deal to enjoy.

But have you noticed how unconsciously influenced I was by the wordy turgidity of Miss Brittain’s style? That passive voice will haunt me.

Typed one-fingered on my mobile, this will have to go out un checked and un-proofed. I’ll do that tomorrow.

Lego: Bosley’s Builders, 11

11. The Stand Off

Jed was pretty happy with the floor they’d laid yesterday. At this rate they’d get the walls complete and happy faces when the hardware shop’s reps arrived later. And all it had needed was him jollying everyone else along.

Bosley is back today, he thought. Here’s hoping he thinks having a foreman—yours truly—a good addition to his crew. It’ll set me up. He made his way toward where Boz beckoned him for his site report.

“Hey, Boss,” Jed said. “We’ve made quite a bit of progress as you can see.” He waved at the hardware store’s floor and walls. “I was thinking we could start on the heavy vehicle garage next. Then by the end of the week, lift Jackie’s and my cabin on top of it.”

“I should be having this discussion with you and Ms Sander,” Bosley said.

Uh oh, Boz has quite the long face, Jed had time to think. “I’ve got nothing in common with her,” he said.

“Sez you,” Bosley said. “What do you see around yourself?”

Jed looked round. He didn’t see anything different, he said with a hand gesture and a shrug.

“What does he see beyond himself?” Tim said. He was repairing Wizard Nin’s shack right there where Bosley organized Jed for a chin-wag. Two against one, was that fair?

“What does he see other than himself,” Drew said, stepping into Jed’s face from the other direction.

Would’ve been funny except Jed started to feel like they were ganging up on him.

“Go at it, brother,” Bosley said cryptically.

“It’s a done deal in my mind,” Drew stated. “Jackie owns the crane and she’s given us the go-ahead. Jed owns the truck and he can leave when he wants.”

“You’ll take Jackie’s crane off my truck? No! No way!” Jed cried, suddenly seeing the plot. “What’s a truck by itself?”

“Jed! Cheer up,” Dan said. “You’ll have a ton of options.”

Jed groaned. “Not you too? You’re supposed to be my friend.”

“I am your friend,” Dan said. “You and me with a truck each? Salvaging. You and the hardware store? Power storage when we get you fitted with a power module and they have a windmill operating in the channel. You and the community? Say we need a performance stage? You and the herders? They need their cabin took to their pylons? No mid-size crane is going to manage that. It’ll need incremental lifting with … “

“No!” Jed said again. “I’m leaving! I knew it would come to this. We should never have come. You’re chasing me away!”

He stomped to his and Jackie’s cabin, and threw his things together. I don’t believe it! I’m back to camping?

The rest of them listened further and heard the truck door slam, and the truck engine tick over. Then Jed drove toward the track out.

“Okay. That’s the crane gone,” Bosley said. “Have we still got that shadoof thing?”

“I’m blank on what you’re talking about,” Tim said.

“That’ll be a ditto for me,” Dan agreed.

“I saw it yesterday,” Drew said. “We’ve got that and the conveyor belt still. We’ll manage.”

“You hear something?” Tim said to Dan.

“Yes. The hardware store’s runabout. Is it both of them?” Dan said.

“It is, but Ms Bee is tying up the boat.”

“I’m gone,” Dan said.

“Ditto,” Tim said. “I’m meeting Trish for a cuppa. You should come along. She said we should start planning the canteen, since this hillock,” he stamped his boot. “Will likely take two slabs. And the canteen will probably take at least two cabins.”

“Cowards,” Drew said. “Don’t plan too far ahead of the stair building. Or the materials for that matter.”

“I bet Trish will want more arches,” Dan said. “Do you recall where you got them?”

“What’s this about me and him?” Ms Sander said, pointing her chin at Jed ploughing across the mudflats. She looked thunderous.

Bosley didn’t wilt. “Both you and Jed have unrealistic expectations,” he said. “Had a look around recently?”

“Like lift your gaze to the world in general,” Drew said helpfully.

“My supply lines are intact,” flashed Ms Sander. “My customer base is growing. My second- floor hasn’t even been begun yet, but we all know the hold-up there!”

“I’ll say it again,” Drew said. “Had a look around recently?” He didn’t let her get a word in. He felt like something in him had snapped during the long lay-up. “Parts are what are missing! Our spreadsheet is like a mosaic of blanks!”

Bosley frowned Ms Sander into silence.

Drew continued. “Supply chains other than apparently yours are fragmented! These floods,” he indicated the swamp now surrounding them, “Are playing havoc with deliveries.”

“Making do with what we have is the name of the new game,” Bosley said at Ms Bee arriving belatedly. “In other words, when I come to do your stairs, you will gracefully accept whatever color scheme I can manage!”

Bee smiled winningly at him. “We will, Bosley,” she said. She arm-in-armed Ms Sander away with her. “Let’s think about our interiors, Sandy. We could book Julie & Juliette. I’m sure they’ll be able to come up with a scheme to complement Bosley’s.”

Drew laughed. “You were supposed to melt just then.”

Bosley flushed. “Yeah, right. Me and everybody else!”

What ‘Place’ Means to Me

The Painted Word #14

Delving Yardbarker’s post about Place on their blog Faded Houses Green, started me thinking about what place has meant to me over the years, and how that affects my story making.

My best childhood places and events resonate in me with bursts of color. My first clear self-remembered memory is of the upturned faces of golden dandelion flowers starring the flooded and frozen grassland where my father took me and my little brothers ice skating. I was about six-years-old and had ‘proper’ child-sized skates. My brothers had flat, double-edged pieces of Meccano strapped under their shoes.

Much further on in the same year there were the glory of dahlias in a three-brick high garden bed in the backyard. A riot of pinks, plum red, orange, and golds that pronged into my eyes and heart so that I was rarely aware of the voracious pigeons sharing the backyard, quarreling over the feed scattered over the patio.

The master bedroom was curtained with a pink-orange tinted cotton. When the afternoon sun shone through, the room glowed red-gold, and I loved to be there then. Roundabout when I turned seven, my mother said that I wasn’t to hover at the bedroom door and make a nuisance of myself. She’d loaned the bedroom to a pair of unmarried teenagers expecting twins, and life became grey and ordinary for a while. Grey skies. Grey streets, red-grey brick houses. Seven dried up leaves on the sapling outside the front door.

One autumn we camped at a place called ‘Ommen’ where golden chanterelle mushrooms grew in the pine and beech forests nearby. My mother took us mushroom hunting and to find the little triangular brown beechnuts that fit exactly between my first three finger tips. Fried together on the primus camp-stove, these ‘fruits of the forest’ made dinner that night a feast.

And so I find that most of my clearest, earliest, visual memories of places are to do with warm vibrant colors. Being given my first orange when I was about eight years old, what a delicious thrill that was. I kept it for days in a special tin under my bed, to take it out and drink in its glory. Hot golden potato fries deliciously fragrant with mayonnaise that we sometimes had from a particular shop in De Haag on the way home from a long trip.

My first Lego set, the size of a packet of cigarettes, that had enough red bricks in it to build a little house, and that because I received it as a going-away present, I will always associate with the ship we traveled on to Indonesia.

Of course there were more colors. Skies of washed-out blue, steel grey or unbroken cloud. The North Sea, when I saw it, was usually also steel grey. River boats were brown or slick grey with rain and river water. The Hoogovens (steelworks) had a tall chimney belching out yellow-grey. Shades of green did not particularly impress me in those childhood days. The saddest book I ever read had covers of dark green leather.

When I look back on those years, it seems now that most people then kept their vibrant colors for indoors. Traditionalists had their rich red Persian rugs as table covers—after a meal they swept crumbs from them using a special stoffer-en-blikje, (dustpan and brush), with brass handles. Needle-worked scatter cushions and cross-stitched wall hangings brightened cosy living rooms. Highly polished brass planters and vases reflected firelight and old fashioned oil lamps.

Experiment with watercolor paint and starburst foil

The Hush Button …

Part of the ‘control tower’

Up in the upper left. Ever met one of these? First time for me too.

I had so much to learn, move, stack, shift and unpack that I just looked it for the whole first seven days I was here, while I learned the other three.

Me saying ‘learned’ up there instead of ‘learnt’ will tell you the learning is ongoing. My control over the downlight switches needs fine tuning.

The fan, which is great, is controlled contrarily. 3 = 1 and 1 = 3 if that makes any sense. Thankfully, all three fans in the house work the same.

The left hand light ‘switch’ works the far four downlights in the living area. The right hand switch operates the nearer downlights.

The kitchen has its own array of controls.

The HUSH button?

I asked Deb from Admin when she came yesterday to talk me through my first monthly EEVI check. Which is a whole other kettle of fish.

The HUSH button will calm the fire alarm, say you set it off accidentally burning your toast, or something.

The New Place …

Where to start?

The improvements on the previous place are numerous though I’m too tired now to do little more than describe the excellent light … in the lounge room, one whole wall is ceiling to floor glass, fixed panes and sliding doors, about two and a three quarter meters tall.

Where I’m sitting on the couch typing this blog post, what I see opposite is Rainer Hartlieb’s work of timber art … the shelf units he made for me in 2014 or thereabouts, when I lived in my Mullumbimby house … put back together and adapted for the space by my son.

This version of the shelf unit is approximately 75 centimeters shorter than the original which had a window seat included. The uprights and top length are of Queensland kauri. The short side shelves might be white pine, though I don’t recall that for certain. They made up three large handrails salvaged from a building site. The broad lower shelves are cypress pine, a width of timber that will never be seen again. These were my discovery. A $30 score from a secondhand store, they’d been used in a paint store, their undersides a thick coating of spilled paint.