I’ve voted Labour all my life, except for a period after Tony Blair led us into war on Iraq, and even then, could not have voted Conservative. We watched the news as a family when I was young, and I have a clear memory of the Labour politicians of my youth: Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle, Dennis Healey (I bumped into him once on Charing Cross Road and he gave me a lovely twinkly smile from beneath those bushy eyebrows). They were the bright young things when Clem Attlee was Prime Minister, and although I knew his name, I was sadly unaware of the extent of this man’s huge contribution to the quality of life for British people over the last 70 years. After reading Francis Beckett’s beautifully written and accessible biography of the man, I feel better informed.

Clem Attlee was a small, quiet man, from a middle-class background. He was educated at Haileybury, a boarding school, and Oxford,  following his father into a law practice. Had it not been for some voluntary work  he undertook in the East End of London, this ex-Major, who saw active service in the First World War (he was the last but one soldier to leave Gallipoli when it was evacuated), might have lived an altogether different life.

One evening in 1906, Attlee went along with his brother on a visit to a youth club in Durham Road, Stepney. Haileybury House had been built by old boys of their former school who had decided, in 1890, to do something to help clergy active in the working-class areas of the big cities. One of the growing influences leading to this work was a pamphlet published by the Revd Andrew Mearns in 1883 - The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor.

A shy young man, Attlee found the evening uncomfortable, but he learned enough to want to come again - the start of a process which opened his eyes to the appalling conditions suffered by those less fortunate than the prosperous Edwardian middle and upper classes, and the real meaning of poverty. His involvement increased from that night on - he felt for the first time in his life he was doing something with a purpose. He realised, as Andrew Mearns had written, that only large-scale action by the state could have any serious impact - unless society was organised so as to eliminate it, the wretchedness he saw around him would continue for ever.

By 1907, Attlee was a socialist, and he began his political career as a member of the Stepney branch of the Independent Labour Party. He very quickly took on the onerous and painstaking duties of branch secretary, giving his time and skills unstintingly. His closeness and work with the ordinary East End people and orderly upward progress through the rank and file of the local Labour group gave him an invaluable insight into their real problems, aims and ambitions. As Beckett relates:

'He took on all the humble, time-consuming jobs which have to be done, and which ambitious politicians generally consider are for lesser mortals, because, like Jim Callaghan, Clem Attlee liked all that. He cut up loaves to feed dockers'  children during the 1911 dock strike, and stood at the bottom of Petticoat Lane with his brother Tom holding collecting boxes during the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union strike in 1913. He carried the Stepney Independent Labour Party branch banner on demonstrations through Central London. He went to court to plead mitigation when a half-starving boy was caught thieving.'

Beckett’s book outlines the life of a man who dedicated himself to working, for 16 hours a day for 45 years or so, for the good of the many, not the few. He became Mayor of Stepney, then its MP in 1922, a junior minister in Labour governments in the 20s and 30s, and party leader in 1935.

Attlee's commitment to realising his ambition of bringing about fundamental changes for the working-classes achieved, with his fellow Labour party workers, the radical creation of what we benefit from today. Most people of my generation (born in the 1950s) and those since have no knowledge or experience of what life was like before the welfare state - we’ve taken it for granted.

He was in many ways, a very unusual man. He led a quiet and modest home life, dedicated to his wife and children, never ‘taking work home’ to his family. He liked mending things in his spare time. He never read the papers or watched television. He worked steadily towards his aims, not swayed by the opinion of others. He was not a pacifist, though his older brother Tom was a conscientious objector, but  had been appalled by the waste of life he witnessed in the Great War, and was a passionate supporter of the League of Nations and later the United Nations. His early experience of social work contributed to his writing The Social Worker,and  teaching the subject at the LSE. He had very definite views about charity: he thought that if a rich man wanted to help the poor, he should pay his taxes willingly, not dole out money at whim. He wrote:

Charity ‘tends to make the charitable think that he has done his duty by giving away some trifling sum, his conscience is put to sleep and he takes no trouble to consider the social problem any further’. 

Attlee served in Churchill's coalition government as Deputy Prime Minister during the Second World War, effectively running the country while Churchill concentrated on the business of fighting the war. Attlee was a staunch patriot, but once the war was over, he had an iron resolve to ensure that, unlike the aftermath of the First World War, when so many were thrown onto the streets, this time the opportunity to effect real change in the social welfare of the majority of the British people would not be lost.  After the war, Attlee led the most influential reforming government of the last century, implementing the recommendations of the Beveridge Report, establishing the NHS and nationalising a fifth of the UK economy including the coal mining and steel industries.

There are many similarities between Clem Attlee and Jeremy Corbyn - both suffered/suffer at the hands of the media - in Attlee's case, the rich owners of large-circulation newspapers. Both had to contend with members of their own party complaining that they weren't  leadership material, and regularly plotting to replace them. The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the saying goes!

I believe that if Clem Attlee was alive today, he would be horrified at the way his life's work has been steadily undermined in the intervening years, a process begun during the Margaret Thatcher years, of course, and now being greatly accelerated.

If you need just one out of many reference points from a welter of current revelations about how the welfare state and NHS are being relentlessly deconstructed, please read this article about the Naylor report, about which many of us had been ignorant until this week!

www.independent.co.uk/news/health/naylor-report-tory-nhs-privatisation-healthcare-flog-off-conservatives-theresa-may-election-2017-a7766326.html    

​If you have more time available, and I can promise you, it will be very worthwhile reading it, I highly recommend you read Francis Beckett's book. Towards the end of it, there is a little story of an incident, near the end of Attlee's life, which illustrates his modesty and humility. In 1912, the London School of Economics initiated took over a small School of Sociology, and Attlee was appointed its very first lecturer. In 1962:

'The LSE's Social Administration Department, where he had once taught, sent round a standard invitation to all of its former staff to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. The organisers thought that the early staff members had died, but just as the platform was settling down in the Shaw Library, someone noticed a small, elderly man arriving inconspicuously and taking a seat at the back. Bernard Crick remembers: 'One of the platform party ran to the back in embarrassment to apologise and try to persuade him to come up to the front. He refused, or rather demurred. The audience, as he was recognised, rose to its feet and applauded. Only then would he join the platform. Afterwards they asked when his car was coming. "No car, came from Kings Cross on the 68 bus. A very reliable route." They had great difficulty persuading him to take a lift back.'

When I saw that Professor Iain Hutchison was giving a talk on his work with Saving Faces at Hall Place (where there was also an exhibition on the related subject of Faces of the Great War) I realised that to go and hear him would mean taking a day off work. It was well worth it.

Professor Hutchison specialises in diseases and injuries affecting the face. He is based at the historic St Bartholomew’s Hospital and the Royal London Hospital.  He spoke of  the relationship between art and medicine, mentioning Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo amongst artists who made representations of the anatomy of the human body, and also spoke of William Hogarth, whose murals of The Pool of Bethesda can be seen in the Great Hall at Bart’s Hospital.

The professor related some of the history of surgeons who worked on restoring faces ravaged by injury or disease, including:

• Harold Gillies, who worked on pioneering  plastic surgery in the First World War 
• Italian surgeon Tanzini,who  invented a technique of using  a pedicled flap of skin and underlying latissimus dorsi muscle. The development of his work was held back for some decades after being somewhat denigrated by Gillies, but his ideas are now very influential.
• Dr Varaztad Kazanjian, a refugee from the Armenian genocide, and Professor of Dentistry, who worked on the front line in WW1, was knighted, studied medicine at Harvard, and became a founding father of plastic and reconstructive surgery in the USA

Professor Hutchison was brought up by two refugees: his mother and aunt, both Viennese Jewish doctors whose father was also a doctor. They fled from the Nazis in the late 1930s, were taken in by Quakers, and worked at the beginning of the Second World War as chambermaids, initially in Tunbridge Wells. After the war they set up as GPs in the Midlands.  When the Professor’s mother, Dr. Martha Redlich, died, he set up a charity in her name, initially used to purchase occasional pieces of surgical equipment. However, by 1995 he decided to use her legacy to create something  in the spirit of the work done by Harold Gillies and Henry Tonks. In 1998 he established the Saving Faces Art Project, employing Mark Gilbert as artist-in-residence within his surgical department.

Their shared aim was to help bring about acceptance of changed faces not only by patients themselves, but also by members of the public. The belief that people could find a painting of such damaged faces much less shocking than photographs, was borne out by members of our audience, who looked away from coloured photographs projected onto a screen in front of us. Mark Gilbert’s practice, which included taking a selection of photographs of operations, was also to ask patients if they would be willing to sit for portraits before and after their operations.  The sitters, Professor Hutchison told us, were proud of these paintings, and wanted them shown to others. They must have had a profound effect on visitors to a travelling exhibition of 100 portraits. One person wrote 6 pages of comment in the visitors’ book, and another wrote  “Testino showed the beautiful people, but these are the really beautiful people”. 
 
The professor told us that  in his experience, returning to normal life is what people want. The late actress Sheila Gish returned to the stage in The Seagull just six weeks after surgery, having lost bones of her face and an eye to melanoma. Courage indeed.

Professor Hutchison wants to raise four x  £5m to endow four professors  to lead the Centre’s work into the future. Saving Faces will control (and protect) their funding, not the hospital. JK Rowling has already promised to match £1m donation if it can be raised. One of the fellowships will, he hopes, be named for Alan Rickman, who was a patron.

If any readers of this blog can help with crowdfunding, he would be glad to hear from them.

Postscript:
Interestingly, Hall Place was the birthplace of another surgeon, Julius Jeffreys, who may well, I like to think, have crossed paths with my great-great-grandparents, John Howard Wakefield and his wife Maria Suffolk.

Related Links:

Saving Faces
www.savingfaces.co.uk

Hogarth Murals at Barts
www.bartsgreathall.com/index.php/the-great-hall/the-hogarth-murals

​Surgeon Julius Jeffreys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Jeffreys

John Howard Wakefield & Maria Suffolk
http://www.judithjohnson.co.uk/blog/the-indian-princess

Readers of this blog and my book will know that I have an abiding interest in the lives of those who fought in the Great War. One particular aspect which has always aroused my deep compassion is the fate of those who survived, but were badly disfigured. Some lived as recluses for the rest of their lives, and others braved the looks of horror they encountered when venturing out in public.

There is a historic relationship between those injured and the skill, not only of surgical teams, but of artists too. The German artist Otto Dix was one of those who portrayed the unpalatable face of war that, while disturbing, allows us to look at an image which, in a photograph, is so much starker.

I have a copy of Ernst Friedrich's 1924 anti-war book Krieg dem Kriege. I have actually stuck a post-it note on the fly-leaf, inscribed 'Warning! Contains very graphic images', and I keep it on a high shelf as I would not want little ones to come across it while exploring our bookshelves. The photographs are shocking. It was Friedrich’s aim to bring to readers' attention the true cost of war. The only other place I’ve seen images like this is at the tatty profit-making private exhibition next to a cafe  near Ypres, behind which is a wood including what is  claimed to be  an original trench system. It has made a fortune for its owners, and is abhorred by the local museums, although some teachers leading trips prefer it, feeling it shows pupils something the others have sanitised.

I recently visited the Faces of the Great War exhibition at Hall Place in Bexley, Kent (and heard there a talk on a related subject: blog to follow).  The exhibition told the story of the pioneers of plastic surgery in Britain from the point of view of the medical staff led by New-Zealand born surgeon Harold Gillies and their patients, based at the Queen Mary Military Hospital in Sidcup, which opened in 1917. Gillies, who moved here from the Cambridge Military Hospital , was inspired by the pioneering skin graft French surgeon Hippolyte Morstin, and in the next World War, Gillies' cousin Archibald McIndoe went on to reconstruct the faces of badly burnt airmen at East Grinstead.

Gillies recruited leading artists, including Henry Tonks and sculptor Kathleen Scott, widow of Scott of the Antarctic, to help in the work of rebuilding the ruined faces of the severely-wounded.  More than 5,000 wounded men from Britain and its Empire came to Sidcup, and more than 11,000 operations were carried out.

Henry Tonks,  a trained surgeon himself, went on to become a celebrated Professor at the Slade School of Art. Gillies asked him to make a record of men's facial injuries which could be referenced for operations and subsequent recovery. Tonks chose to work in pastels, as it was a quick medium that could be easily blended with the finger, and he wanted the men to sit for the shortest time possible. Today, these pastels can be viewed, upon request, at the Hunterian Museum in London. A number had been loaned to Hall Place, and they were displayed in a curtained-off section, again with a warning that the images might disturb. If today, with all we can see on the media, this notice is still considered necessary, how much harder it must have been for those with disfigurements to step out from the safety of their hospital wards or homes. 

I found these portraits, accompanied by biographical detail, very touching. They included the following:
 
Private Robert Davidson, RAMC Orderly, was wounded in April 2016. He was initially reluctant to mix with his fellow patients, but after his discharge in 1919 he continued to work at the Queen Mary Hospital in Sidcup until the 1960s, having married Sidcup resident Alice Wise.

Private George J Stone, 1st Newfoundland Regiment, suffered a gunshot wound to the upper lip in France on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, aged 21. He contracted a severe infection six weeks after wounding, so his first operation was delayed until three months after the initial injury. He underwent six operations at the Cambridge Military Hospital, Aldershot and at Queen's Hospital, Sidcup. By August 1918, Private Stone declined any further treatment for facial injury, and returned home to Bell Island, off Newfoundland, to work as a machinist.

Private S Gardiner, a 35 year old New Zealander serving with the 7th Canterbury Regiment, suffered a gunshot wound on the First Day of the Somme which fractured his jaw. He underwent three operations, and ten months after his injury, surgeons tried to graft bone to bridge the gap in his jawbone. Because he lacked teeth, the wound didn't heal properly, and the graft was removed. In 1950, Gardiner returned to visit Gillies in the UK, reporting that six of his seven sons had served in the Second World War, all returning to NZ with their jaws intact.

Sadly, Lieutenant Dudley Grinlington, of the 48th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force, did not fare so well. He was admitted to the Cambridge Military Hospital, Aldershot, in August 1916 after a gunshot wound to his left cheek nine days earlier. Discharged in March 1917, he returned to active service and was killed in action on 17 October during the Battle of Passchendaele. Having been shot in the knee, he perished, in the same casualty clearing station he had passed through a year earlier. He is buried in Nine Elms Military Cemetery, near Poperinghe.

The exhibition was curated with a sure, light touch - not overwhelming or overstuffed. I was glad to see and learn of some new things, among them:

The GRI Silver badge, first issued in 1916, was worn by those not able to fight: discharged owing to wounds, ill-health, or had reached the age of 51. Hopefully these helped to fend off the advances of the white-feather brigade...

Steel helmets were not standard issue to soldiers until 1916; before that they had soft caps.

Blue benches were provided along the road from St Mary's hospital to the village of  Sidcup exclusively for recovering patients to sit on when out for a walk, which could be avoided, presumably, by more squeamish local residents (though many treated the soldiers with great kindness).

Ironically, the MG08 machine-gun, which could fire up to 400 rounds per minute, and was used by the German Army in WW1, was an adaptation of Hiram Maxim's original 1884 Maxim Gun, manufactured in Crayford (6 miles from Queen Mary's Hospital)  by Vickers at the time when Maxim was resident in Bexley.
 
 
Further reading:

Krieg dem Kriege: Ernst Friedrich - Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munchen (reprinted 2004)

My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young (grand-daughter of Kathleen Scott)
A wonderful novel which I also learnt from.
​
War, Art & Surgery: The Work of Henry Tonks and Julia Midgley (Ed. Samuel JMM Alberti, Royal College of Surgeons, 2014)

Related Links:

The Tonks Pastels  (Please note: graphic images)
http://www.gilliesarchives.org.uk/tonkspastels.htm

Otto Dix - article with images from The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/may/14/art-apocalypse-otto-dix-first-world-war-der-krieg-in-pictures

Vickers Factory, Crayford
http://www.crayfordhistory.co.uk/index/history-of-vickers-crayford/

I spent three jam-packed days last week visiting coach companies in Cumbria, Northumbria, Yorkshire,  and Lincolnshire. As a southerner who has rarely ventured north,  and  a deeply curious person, I found it frustrating to have to drive past such tantalising sights as the sign for the village near Kendal which is the home of my Quaker ancestors, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Fountains Abbey, the Angel of the North and the beautiful Beverley Minster. One day I would like to do a tour of the great Cathedrals and ruined abbeys of Britain - Ely, Peterborough, Lincoln, Norwich etc.

I could not, however, forgo the opportunity, however brief, of driving alongside a mile or so of Hadrian’s Wall - longed-for sight since my early childhood. It didn’t disappoint! I stopped for five minutes at Birdoswald Fort (more of a butterfly kiss than a long embrace) and stood, exhilarated, facing into a fierce westerly, thinking of WH Auden’s wonderful poem, Roman Wall Blues. If you don’t know it:
 
Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I’ve lice in my tunic, a cold in my nose.
 
The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I’m a Wall soldier, I don’t know why.
 
The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl’s in Tungria; I sleep alone.
 
Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don’t like his manners, I don’t like his face.
 
Piso’s a Christian, he worships a fish;
There’d be be no kissing if he had his wish.
 
She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.
 
When I’m a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.
 
I also relished the chance later that day to drive over the Humber Bridge.

“This is the first time I’ve driven over the Humber. I’m quite excited!” I told the nice lady at the toll booth, as I handed her my £1.50.
​
“Oh, well, enjoy the bridge!” was her friendly reply.
 
I’m grateful that at 60, I can still feel the wonder and excitement of a child at times like this. Life is good!
 

The American anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever does.

In the current climate, when so many of us feel almost overwhelmed by the cataclysmic changes occurring all over the world, many wise voices, Robert Reich amongst them, are urging us not to give in to the paralysing feeling that it’s all too much, and there’s nothing we can do.

One small change we have recently made in our house is to close up a loophole in our commitment not to eat factory-farmed meat. We have for years, as much as our domestic budget allowed, bought free-range meat, and have only used free-range eggs for decades now, but we had continued to eat meat when out and about in establishments where there was no claim made about how the animal was reared.

I won’t go into the horrors of factory-farming - there is plenty on the internet*- but share a couple of thoughts. To any woman who has gone through the intense tenderness of early breast-feeding, I think we can all empathise with a sow that is constrained in a metal pen while her piglets are allowed constant access to her teats, literally tearing them into a bloody state. And I recall an acquaintance who through economic misfortune was reduced, late in life, to collecting cracked eggs from a battery-farm barn. The smell was so overpowering, he said, that he frequently had to exit the barn to vomit.

We decided last autumn that we would henceforth buy organic meat wherever possible, given that organic farmers, committed to not using antibiotics routinely, have to give their animals more care in respect of room to breathe and roam etc.  This meat naturally costs more, so we agreed to eating smaller portions - no great imposition, as we are already a family that by choice generally has more veg than meat  on a plate!

When we bought our first organic free-range chicken, the flatness of the breast (no growth hormones!) was noticeable. It looked and tasted like the chickens we used to have on the table when we were children. It also had no red burn-marks on the legs from excreta-saturated barn-floors. It’s actually more economical to buy  a whole chicken and joint it for casseroles etc than to buy portions, and the carcass makes great chicken-stock for soups, rice dishes, etc.

The second part of our commitment was not to eat meat when we were away from home unless it was clearly labelled as free-range, so actually we just eat vegetarian most times. The Toby chain’s a good option when travelling - they’re all over the place, and you can have a lovely plate of fresh veg and the vegetarian alternative to the Carvery meats - there are usually three choices including a vegan one.

So a win-win-win result! Less cruelty to animals, better health, increase in self-esteem resulting from sticking to our principles, and lastly better taste: we tried some of Helen Browning’s Organic dry-cured bacon for lunch today, and Martin commented it was the best bacon sandwich he’d  ever eaten. Praise indeed!
 
*For an obviously authentically-researched fictional account of factory farming chickens, try Martina Lewycka’s novel Two Caravans.
 
 

​I've struggled to write my blog since the bombshell of the vote for Brexit in June, and in the face of all the suffering and upheaval around the world - not just in Syria, but in so many other places. I would sit down at the keyboard to write something, only to falter half-way through - my thoughts seemed irrelevant and simplistic. With the further shock, in November, of Donald Trump's elevation to President-Elect, I felt even more paralysed,  by the constant flow of bad news.

But the most hopeful messages I've seen of late, from the sane voices of people like Caroline Lucas, George Monbiot, and Brendan Cox, exhort us to do what we can, where we are. I've joined the Green Party this year, and made contributions, where able, to charities which are out there doing the necessary work on the ground, both here and abroad. I hope to keep an open mind, make an effort to be informed of the facts, and offer service, where I can, to help others.

I took down my kitchen calendar off its peg yesterday to copy the birthdays onto my new one, and as I went through it I was reminded, once again, that while the larger joys and sorrows of mankind played out in the wider world, I was fortunate to have my annual share of good things, the everyday activities that make my world go round: haircuts in the kitchen, yoga classes, visits to family and friends, and hospitality reciprocated, fellowship with like-minded others, shopping and cooking, reading and cinema, music, occasional trips to museums and exhibitions, walking and talking, feeding the birds, working and resting, the sadness of those who we have cherished passing away mixed with the celebration and shared love of my niece's wedding, an old friend's 70th birthday party - the list goes on!

I try not to take these things for granted, knowing that there are many who don't benefit in the same way. I write a gratitude list every night before I go to sleep, and in the last year the gifts of being a grandmother have featured - our beautiful grand-daughter shows us, as my son did when he was a child, a picture of what we so often forget: the wonder, merriment and joy of living in the now, of bearing no grudge or bitterness in the heart, the pleasure of munching on plump raspberries ...we adore her!

I write at least three things, and very often there are more, but what crops up most are the basic building blocks of life, that we all must surely need in common: a quiet, peaceful, warm, dry, safe home; three nutritious meals; good health (which, if we have it, we can count, if we are wise, as the equivalent of having won the lottery every time we wake); doing our allotted work as well as we can; and a loving, kind, tolerant, patient companion (in this case my husband) - with whom I share so much laughter, still, after 40 years together. Life is not all plain sailing, but these things have got me through the difficult painful times, along with the help, as I believe, of something far greater than myself.

Of all the Christmas films I annually cry over (including It's A Wonderful Life) which  encourage me to accept the things I cannot change, I naturally treasure most that which personifies my own cultural heritage and sums up the hope of finding redemption from darkness and hard-heartedness - Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol. Whatever your higher power is, or is not -  'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower', the love that will not let you go, or just what is larger than your individual existence, then I pray, in the year to come, as Tiny Tim does, "God bless us, every one". 

Private Roland Eldrige, No 1945, 19th Bn Australian Infantry, AIF, died on 11 November 1916, age 31. He is Buried at Heilly Station Cemetery, Mericourt l’Abbe, Somme, France: Grave ref V.E.3. He was the son of Ellen Eldridge of 21 Forge Road, Southborough, Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

Roland had emigrated to Australia at the age of 21 and worked as an agriculturist at Surrey Hills, Sydney, New South Wales. He had served with the Kent Volunteers in England. He embarked at Sydney on HMAT A54 Runic on 9 August 1915.

From the Courier, 24 November 1916: Mr and Mrs Eldridge of Forge-road have received the following letter from a Chaplain of the Australian Forces: “I am very sorry to say that your boy was brought in here last night hopelessly wounded. He was unconscious, and did not live long after leaving the ambulance. I have just buried him in our little cemetery, where so many of our brave lads lie. His grave will be marked with a cross.” Private R Eldridge is the fourth son of Mr and Mrs Eldridge, and he joined the 19th Battalion Australian Forces in December 1914. He was twice wounded while serving in the Dardanelles. It is a coincidence that he should have been killed four days after Sergeant Parker (whose death was reported last week) with whom he went to Australia about seven years ago. Mr and Mrs Eldridge have three other sons serving in the Army.

There were lots of things that scared the hell out of me when I was little: earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes, tarantulas, and then perhaps the more likely things, in our corner of Kent, like the idea occurring to me of my mother dying. Then there were the books and pictures I came across on the shelves around the house. One of these which left a lasting impression was a volume of Hieronymus Bosch paintings - scenes of giant men cut in half with little demons sticking pitchforks into them. They held a horrible fascination for me.

When on a walking holiday in the Wildschonau in the Austrian Tyrol this summer, I popped into a small chapel at the side of the parish church in Oberau and found a series of truly gruesome depictions of the hell that awaited unrepentant sinners. Blimey, I bet these kept the congregation in line!

But for all the representations of the Devil and his works that mankind has pictured, surely the only true manifestation of evil on our beautiful planet is when human self-will runs riot. Events in the world so far this year have led many of us to wring our hands in despair -“What can we do about it?” But surely, each of us can do something, however small, each day, right now. For example, the Romanian nurse who, though very busy, gave her full attention to kindly soothing and aiding my mother yesterday when Mum, suffering from a chest infection, couldn’t breathe properly. 

It always surprises me when people say that if there is a God, how can he let things like famine, war, natural disasters and pestilence happen? Well, disasters and disease are part of the natural world, surely, and as for the other two - it’s not a Higher Being, surely, who hoards more food than he needs, who adjusts the price on the market so he can get a higher profit, or appropriates more than her fair share?

​Just saying.

This summer on holiday in Niederau in the Austrian Tyrol I was amused to read the above sign put up by an exasperated farmer. It reads: This is my cows’ salad-bowl, not your dogs’ loo!  In that part of the world, there are still farms in the middle of villages, even towns, and our hotel was right next to this small area of pasture. The hotel allowed guests to bring their pet dogs, so perhaps some owners had been allowing them to soil the grass.

This week I went out with my trusty poop-scoop to pick up several small turds (to use a time-honoured English word), which an irresponsible dog-owner had neglected to remove after allowing their dog to defecate on the pavement. Further up the street, outside the home of a lady whose multiple sclerosis means she has to get about assisted by a mobile scooter, was a larger pile, right in front of her gate. Bad enough, you might think, that she has to steer her scooter out on to the road occasionally when thoughtless car-owners have parked their car across the pavement... (anyone remember that brilliant GLC infomercial from the 1980s featuring an old lady kicking a car off the pavement?).

Across from us, there’s been a running battle going on between a resident and an anonymous dog owner who leaves little plastic bags containing dog poo, neatly tied up, at the base of a lamp-post. Polite printed notices are pinned up, asking for them to be taken away, which only elicit more offerings. Who, for goodness sake, would do this? it’s hard to imagine exactly what form of sociopathy leads someone to leave health hazardous filth in their wake to be slipped on, smeared on passing pushchair wheels, children’s shoes etc. I guess it must be down, in the main, to sheer ignorance.

I’ll finish on a confession. When I was very small (maybe two?) I climbed up on to a wide window-sill and left a little present behind a vase. I can see it now. Perhaps I’d been caught short, or perhaps I was influenced by the tales my older brothers had told me about the witch who lived down the toilet bowl and came up when you pulled the chain!  Anyhow, I remember thinking that no-one would ever know it was me, or they would think our  Shetland Sheepdog  had left it.  I can’t remember the outcome, but it can’t have taken Sherlock Holmes to work out who had done the evil deed!