How They Saw It

I’ve been reading Sapper’s First World War stories this week, which makes a nice change from standing on a stepladder breathing paint. These are the stories he wrote before he found the formula with Bulldog Drummond and, for anyone interested in the war, fascinating stuff. 

They’re not particularly for the faint-hearted – he loathed the enemy and there’s some blood-curdling descriptions of bayonet work.  They’re particularly interesting because they’re very close up to the action (he wrote them while on active service in France) and contain all sorts of tiny details of everyday life that a more distant view glosses out.  I doubt very much if a Sapper would be published today.  He espouses the Allied cause heart and soul and had no doubt about the virtues of what they were doing.  There’s no split vision, no asking of what’s it all about?

The Wikipeadia article on Sapper says the stories were “grimly realistic enough to seem authentic, yet managed to conceal the horrific reality of trench warfare and life at the front line.” 

            I don’t agree that Sapper conceals the reality.  I’ve read shed-loads about the war and plenty of contempory accounts and the Sapper war stories  chime in with the general feel of other accounts written at the same time.  The war poets, who many people know, tend to get lumped together, but there’s a lot of variation in what they actually said.

I say contemporary on purpose, because a lot of what we think of as the big books of the Great War, such as Robert Graves’ Goodbye To All That are written about ten years afterwards.  During that time a lot of the old hatreds had died down, an intellectual cyncism had taken hold of life and the country had gone through the Great Depression.  So what had the war been for?  After all, all that pain, discomfort and sacrifice should have amounted to something, shouldn’t it?  It’s a very natural feeling and fed the embittered we-were-fooled view that held sway in the late Twenties and Thirties.

 It was in 1933 that the Oxford Union Debating Society passed its famous resolution That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country and that attitude  fuelled the view of the war that held sway for years afterwards.  When Alan Clarke weighed in with his notorious book Lions Lead By Donkeys it seemed to tell it like it was.  (Alan Clarke, incidentally, made up the phrase.  He attributed it to a German general to give it a bit more gravitas but he made it up, all the same.) 

            The truth is, that a defensive war, which from the Allied point of view, the Great War was, is perhaps, although the most morally justifiable and the least satisfactory.  After all, you’re fighting to retain the status quo.  And you won’t get the status quo because far too many people have been injured and died and too much has been destroyed. 

            I wanted to get some of this into the Jack Haldean stories.  Modern historians, by going back to original sources, have re-discovered how people at the time – not ten years afterwards – actually thought.  No one ever said it was all good fun, but a lot did think it was worthwhile.  I don’t know if I’d recommend the Sapper War stories – as I say, they’re far too positive in their certainties for modern taste – but if anyone’s interested in what modern historians think, as opposed to the Lions Led By Donkeys school, I can heartily recommend Gary Sheffield’s Forgotten Victory, Major Gordon Corrigan’s Mud, Blood and Poppycock and Tommy by Richard Holmes. 

            Oh, and Professor Gary Sheffield  of the Birmingham University Centre for First World War Studies) likes my books.  I’ve never had a congratulation that meant so much!

           

When Mother Papered The Parlour

An archaeologist would be interested in my fingernails.  They contain layers of paint that tell (fairly accurately) what colours the house now sports;  dark green and yellow – that’s the kitchen – light blue – that’s the sitting-room – and green and white for the hall and stairs. Oh, and there’s residual bits of paste from the wallpaper in the front room.

I can hear Phil Harding on a future episode of Time Team. (He’s the one with the mangle-worzle accent, side-whiskers, a funny hat and who, judging from the amount of digging he does, must have been a mole in a former life.) “The exciting thing about these fingernails, Tony, is that we can reconstruct exactly what’s been going on here.”

To which Tony replies, with his engaging grin, “Decorating, you mean, Phil?”

Yes: Decorating or The Great Spring Ritual.  It’s not the tried and tested rituals of former years, such as covering yourself in leaves and being Jack-in-the-Green or even sacrificing odd goats on Salisbury Plain, but the mass migration to B and Q, Ikea and Homebase, to emerge triumphant with paint.  Mind you, although there’s not been much written in the Classics on decorating, they’re not entirely silent on the subject.  There’s the old song When father Papered The Parlour for instance.  Yes, I know it’s Mother in my case, but the principle’s the same. When Father papered the parlour, you couldn’t seem him for paste! Dabbing it here, dabbing there! Paste and paper everywhere.  Mother was stuck to the ceiling, the children stuck to the floor. I never knew such a blooming family so stuck up before.

And then there’s Shakespeare.

 Shakespeare doesn’t actually show us Lady Macbeth up a ladder with a tub of Trade White emulsion and a roller in her hand – in true Elizabethan tradition all the really meaty bits occur off-stage - but she must have done something of the sort:  “What!  Will these hands ne’er be clean?”  she questions frantically.  Macbeth, who’d obviously had enough after a hard day Kinging and Murdering followed by a guest appearance with Banquo in Most Haunted tries a bit of Male Common Sense.  (You can hear the tone of voice; Now, now, dear, don’t get so worked up.  Everything will be fine in the morning, you’ll see) advises her to Calm Down. 

 “Wash your hands; put on your night-gown; look not so pale.”  She refuses to chill though;  “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand!” Well, no, but a bath with a bit of Radox and a couple of glasses of red wine work wonders. 

She obviously did her bit around the castle;  here’s a picture of here putting up a new light-fitting.

 

 

I explored new territory this week.  I tell you, armed with a pot of emulsion and a paint-brush, I’m like King Arthur with Excalibur.  Nothing fazes me.  I decorated the study.  Walk round that remark; think about it.  Yes, the study might be a titchy little room with a gas-heater which goes whumpf every time someone turns the hot tap on, but it’s my lair, it’s where I work, it’s knee-deep in paper, computers, printers and random stuff we can’t put anywhere else.  I’ve got bits of a Wellington Bomber in there (seriously – the Brooklands Museum were selling off chunks from a Bomber they found in Loch Ness) and a paperweight given for the Best Play at a Star Trek Convention in 1978, a 1920’s scent-bottle, a replica Magnum as used by Dirty Harry, four pairs of binoculars, an ancient crocodile-skin spoon box, zillions of photos of junior Gordon-Smiths in various stages of development, a Jolly Clam glove puppet from Florida and… Well, you get the idea.  It also contains the Gordon-Smith book collection. 

And the Gordon-Smith book collection, despite numerous trips to the Oxfam bin at the tip, is a sentient force.  It grows; it lives. It must – I’m sure I’ve nearly caught them at it a few times – reproduce.  It stirs, it moves, it seems to feel, the rush of life along its keel, as a poet said somewhere or other when a statue unexpectedly sprang into life and gave everyone a bit of a turn.  So the call has gone out; we’re having new bookcases.  And I’ll have to move all the books.  D’you know, I’m beginning to think Spring isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…

                                

 

When Mother Papered The Parlour

An archaeologist would be interested in my fingernails.  They contain layers of paint that tell (fairly accurately) what colours the house now sports;  dark green and yellow – that’s the kitchen – light blue – that’s the sitting-room – and green and white for the hall and stairs. Oh, and there’s residual bits of paste from the wallpaper in the front room.

I can hear Phil Harding on a future episode of Time Team. (He’s the one with the mangle-worzle accent, side-whiskers, a funny hat and who, judging from the amount of digging he does, must have been a mole in a former life.) “The exciting thing about these fingernails, Tony, is that we can reconstruct exactly what’s been going on here.”

To which Tony replies, with his engaging grin, “Decorating, you mean, Phil?”

Yes: Decorating or The Great Spring Ritual.  It’s not the tried and tested rituals of former years, such as covering yourself in leaves and being Jack-in-the-Green or even sacrificing odd goats on Salisbury Plain, but the mass migration to B and Q, Ikea and Homebase, to emerge triumphant with paint.  Mind you, although there’s not been much written in the Classics on decorating, they’re not entirely silent on the subject.  There’s the old song When father Papered The Parlour for instance.  Yes, I know it’s Mother in my case, but the principle’s the same. When Father papered the parlour, you couldn’t seem him for paste! Dabbing it here, dabbing there! Paste and paper everywhere.  Mother was stuck to the ceiling, the children stuck to the floor. I never knew such a blooming family so stuck up before.

And then there’s Shakespeare.

 Shakespeare doesn’t actually show us Lady Macbeth up a ladder with a tub of Trade White emulsion and a roller in her hand – in true Elizabethan tradition all the really meaty bits occur off-stage - but she must have done something of the sort:  “What!  Will these hands ne’er be clean?”  she questions frantically.  Macbeth, who’d obviously had enough after a hard day Kinging and Murdering followed by a guest appearance with Banquo in Most Haunted tries a bit of Male Common Sense.  (You can hear the tone of voice; Now, now, dear, don’t get so worked up.  Everything will be fine in the morning, you’ll see) advises her to Calm Down. 

 “Wash your hands; put on your night-gown; look not so pale.”  She refuses to chill though;  “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand!” Well, no, but a bath with a bit of Radox and a couple of glasses of red wine work wonders. 

She obviously did her bit around the castle;  here’s a picture of her putting up a new light-fitting.

 

 

I explored new territory this week.  I tell you, armed with a pot of emulsion and a paint-brush, I’m like King Arthur with Excalibur.  Nothing fazes me.  I decorated the study.  Walk round that remark; think about it.  Yes, the study might be a titchy little room with a gas-heater which goes whumpf every time someone turns the hot tap on, but it’s my lair, it’s where I work, it’s knee-deep in paper, computers, printers and random stuff we can’t put anywhere else.  I’ve got bits of a Wellington Bomber in there (seriously – the Brooklands Museum were selling off chunks from a Bomber they found in Loch Ness) and a paperweight given for the Best Play at a Star Trek Convention in 1978, a 1920’s scent-bottle, a replica Magnum as used by Dirty Harry, four pairs of binoculars, an ancient crocodile-skin spoon box, zillions of photos of junior Gordon-Smiths in various stages of development, a Jolly Clam glove puppet from Florida and… Well, you get the idea.  It also contains the Gordon-Smith book collection. 

And the Gordon-Smith book collection, despite numerous trips to the Oxfam bin at the tip, is a sentient force.  It grows; it lives. It must – I’m sure I’ve nearly caught them at it a few times – reproduce.  It stirs, it moves, it seems to feel, the rush of life along its keel, as a poet said somewhere or other when a statue unexpectedly sprang into life and gave everyone a bit of a turn.  So the call has gone out; we’re having new bookcases.  And I’ll have to move all the books.  D’you know, I’m beginning to think Spring isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…

                                

 

Fresh As Paint

I’ve been stuck up a ladder this week, papering the walls.  We had dry rot a while ago.  Don’t have dry rot; it’s less fun than fog at a football match.  The walls were stripped of plaster, the floorboards became a thing of the past, the house stank of chemicals and, when it was all over, I had a bare wall with no paper which couldn’t be covered up for months.  Wouldn’t it be nice, I brightly thought, to have some wall-paper once more?  And, while I’m at it, I might as well do the rest of the downstairs too. So I’m now covered in paint and knackered.

 

 I don’t know what it is about spring, but the urge to decorate creeps up insidiously.  First of all you notice the sitting-room, where you’ve mouldered gently all winter, looks a bit dingy, the next thing you’re in B and Q, squandering the family fortunes on Paint.

 

When did paint get so complicated?  I’m sure I remember the days when it used to come in two sorts; gloss and emulsion.  Gloss was shiny and went on to wood and radiators.  It niffed to High Heaven, took ages to dry, had the temperament of a prima ballerina or Derby winner – and so did I when cat, child or dog came too close – and you had to sluice yourself off with white spirit after using it. Even then, the average gloss-user looked like an Australian Aboriginal painting of dream-time.  Dots, you know.  Also spots and streaks.  Emulsion, a much gentler medium, (mostly) washed off with water – unless it went on the carpet when nothing short of sand-blasting would remove it. 

 

It’s all got confused.  Gloss is no longer universally shiny – it isn’t glossy if you see what I mean – and, although it washes off with water, I don’t know if it’s worth the effort. And as for emulsion… It comes in White, Magnolia and Colours.  White and magnolia are supplied in industrial-sized vats that take two blokes the size of Rugby Forwards to lift.  (Damn the paint – I’ll settle for the transport!) but Colours are more manageable sizes. However, the colours are downright peculiar.

 

 We’ve all learned, since the excesses of the 1970’s not to say Beige – that’s The Colour That Dare Not Speak It’s Name – and substitute cooler sounder words such as Oatmeal, Sand, Stone and Biscuit, but whoever compiles colour charts has left such innocent variations as Biscuit far, far behind.  Cracked Clay; Twisted Bamboo; Quilted Calico.  It’s like some sort of cipher.  

 

I mean, I fancied doing the sitting-room in powder blue.  So is that Wild Water, Atlantic Surf, Velvet Touch or Inky Pool.  Inky Pool?  Or perhaps I should go for Opulent or Cape Wrath. Uh? I just wanted blue… 

 

Puzzled, UK

There was a letter in a writing magazine I picked up from Puzzled, UK, asking for advice.  Puzzled is a member of a writing class and has written the first three chapters of a novel.  So far so good.  Puzzled’s tutor thinks it has potential.  Even better.  But – and this is where Puzzled needs advice – he doesn’t want to write any more in case he’s going in the wrong direction.  He wants to send it out to publishers to get advice (praise?) on how good it is and what direction the novel should go in.

            *Sigh*

             The picture says it all.

 

Cor strewth, I can just imagine sending my agent an unfinished novel. 

(Hilarious nervous laughter; there’s a reason why Jane Wenham-Jones calls her The Fearsome One.)

Don’t do it; just don’t do it.

One has ordinary feelings of human pity, after all.

Look, it’s not easy writing novels, not even bad ones.  There’s a lot of typing for a start and times when, in the throes of Literature, you could have your feet up in front of Top Gear, walking the dog, catching up with your jet-setting celebrity lifestyle, drinking cocoa or counting how many matchsticks it will take to complete your model of Nelson’s Victory.  Any of these activities can be seen as preferable to stewing away in front of a computer screen.  Oh, I’d include cleaning the cat-tray and knocking nails into walls with my forehead along with those. 

A partly-finished book is just that; unfinished. It’s absolutely impossible to tell if it’s any good unless you have the finished article.  If Puzzled could stop thinking of himself as a writer and think of himself as a reader, then he’d answer his own question.

 After all, how many books have you bought, Dear Reader, (to use a charming, old fashioned phrase) where the end’s missing?  (Not counting the tatty paperback from outside the charity shop!) It’s not just books, either. If, for instance, we all flocked to see Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull and it stopped just as Indy approached the Hidden Temple because the writer couldn’t think what happened next, then there’d be tart, disgruntled comments and then some.

You see, despite some evidence to the contrary, editors and agents are human beings.  I’m not kidding.  Yes, I know certain of the tribe wear barbed-wire vests, breath fire and sacrifice their young under the full moon (we’ve all got faults) but honest to God, they’re human. They like to know how a story ends.  And if the author doesn’t know how the story ends – well, who does?  And why should they care?  And if the novel has skidded off in the wrong direction?  Well, it’s up to the author to fix it.  And what’s the wrong direction anyhow?

Besides that, it’s only after finishing a book that you, the writer, gets to look at it as a whole.  Is that the best place to start?  Should I move the passage about the exploding nasal-hair tweezers to Chapter Four?  Do I really need to include all that information about the home-life of Nabopolassar and the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the thrilling chase scene in Chapter Ten and should I make Michael Finnegan a de-frocked priest with the best collection of cheese-lables in South Dakota or a Belfast bus driver? And hasn’t the line It was all a dream been used before?

            Finishing a book is only the start;  there’s stuff to do afterwards.

            And what if, after having spent ages writing it and it gets rejected?  Well, I’m not sure how to break it to Puzzled, but there’s a chance this might happen.  Some years ago, I attended a workshop run by Simon Trewin, the well-known agent.  Mr Trewin, a highly-experienced professional, is open to new ideas and very encouraging to unpublished writers. But no one, he said, needs another novel.  Sad, isn’t it?  Particularly when that novel’s yours.  Yep.  And how many manuscripts does Mr Trewin get a year? Oh, about six thousand.  And how many does he take on?  About six.

So don’t put unnecessary obstacles in your way. There’s enough real ones to go round, believe you me. Writing can be fun, an enjoyable way of getting stuff off your chest, of recording events, of remembering what happened.  It can be all these things and many more.  But if you want other people to read it, please, Puzzled, finish it first. 

 

 

           

Find Your Inner Welshman

The lst of March: Spring is (fingers crossed) just around the corner, I no longer wake up in the pitch dark and, as the day progresses, peer into the gloomy murk which is the North of England in Winter.

It’s amazing what a bit more daylight can do. If I was an ancient Druid or something, I think I’d be moved to nip down to Stonehenge and start chanting at the sun or sacrifice something. It probably wouldn’t cause too much comment in Wiltshire but I’d be looked on as distinctly odd if I started erecting stone tables, wearing long white robes and greeting the dawn with public prayer in Greater Manchester. (I mean, people would look; and comment. And we call ourselves liberated. Huh!)

 

 What I don’t do in the garden: not recently, anyway.

 

 

 

But, in this censorious age, I have to fall back on the more industrial and domestic Signs of Spring.

I’ve been told at least three times by people who come under the category of I-know-them-to speak-to-but-I-don’t-know-their-name-if-you-know-what-I-mean (in the bank, by the bloke behind the ticket desk in the railway station and the pet-shop owner) that it’s getting lighter in the evenings.  It is, we tell each other in awe-struck tones, still daylight at five o’clock. I’m thinking about painting the fence. I’m told to Chill and Stop Stressing when I adjure the offspring in a voice of motherly concern to Wrap Up, It’s Bit Parky Outside. (Mind you, I did think it was a bit early for shorts, even when teamed with the tights and the Ugg boots thought suitable for college wear)  and, in the more traditional signs of Spring, the birds in the garden are kicking up a dickens of a fuss about random bits of twigs and the snowdrops are venturing forth. 

Do you know that terrific medieval song, Summer is y-comen in? Although it says Summer, the songster is obviously talking about Spring.  It obviously is a song and not a poem and I can imagine it being bellowed out cheerfully by peasants and Aged Crones in Ye Olde Pubbe, the Saracen’s Eyeball, or DunCrusadin, quaffing ale or mead or whatever the equivalent of half of Carlsberg or a gin and tonic with ice and lemon and a little umbrella was.  (Quaffing, as I’ve heard it said, is like drinking, only you spill more.) There aren’t many songs about flatulence, not that are printed in anthologies of poetry, anyway, so it’s worth noting for that alone.

Excuse the medieval accent:  Summer is y-comen in, Loude sing, cuckoo!  Bullock starteth, bucke fartheth, Merry sing, cuckoo!

            Anyway, the 1^st of March.  I hope everyone dined exclusively on leeks to celebrate St David, the patron saint of Wales, and his Day. Despite beating us at Rugby (which caused some major distress and heart-searchings in the Gordon-Smith household) the Welsh are OK.

An Irish friend of mine refers to the Welsh as The Irish Who Can’t Swim but there are some pretty good reasons for staying in Wales, such as mouth-watering scenery and some of the daftest road-signs in Britain, which adds humour to your journey.  St Davids itself, the smallest city in the UK (a city needn’t be glittering sky-scrapers or urban deprivation but merely a town with a cathedral) is a lovely place and Pembrokeshire idyllic.  So, altogether now; plunge deep within to find your Inner Welshman and let’s let rip with a rousing chorus of Cwm Rhondda.