Judith Johnson
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The Inheritors

31/8/2014

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PictureDad and friend at Stonehenge, 1920s
I found William Golding's The Inheritors a most marvellous read. Golding, enters, and leads us into, a prehistoric world, a place and time where a small group of Neanderthals encounter a larger party of 'the new people', Homo Sapiens. The vivid, masterly writing, issuing from Golding's creative imagination, is told from the point of view, for most of the book, of the Neanderthals, and we see how they struggle to make sense of what they are experiencing for the first time. The reader is included in this process, and I and my son, in discussing the book, found that we had both needed to go back over a page sometimes to fully comprehend what was being described.

The violent disruption of their lives by the savagery of strangers, who have the advantage of  better technology, is a sad fore-runner of  conquests to come throughout mankind's ensuing history; yet, the new people are not two-dimensional baddies - Golding concludes the book with a chapter from their viewpoint.

The writing is captivating - all the more amazing, when you read in John Carey's introduction, that Golding wrote this (published in 1955) and each of his first four novels during lunch hours, breaks and holidays while teaching at Bishop Wordsworth's school in Salisbury.

My son lent me his copy of The Inheritors. He is fascinated by prehistoric man.  I sometimes wonder if this interest was sparked by a weekend jaunt we had when he was a small boy. We had, at that time, little cash, but we spent lots of time in free museums, walking in woods, visiting old churches etc. One summer Saturday morning we set off early for Salisbury, where we ate lardy cake in the bustling market, looked round Salisbury Cathedral, visited Stonehenge, looked for Hayter ancestors in the graveyard at Winterbourne Stoke, and spent the night in Amesbury. The next day we saw Silbury Hill, the Neolithic tomb at West Kennet Long Barrow, and Avebury Circle before driving back to East Sussex. Enough to fire any child's imagination if he or she is lucky enough to possess an unspoilt capacity for wonder! My son is an artist and art teacher today, and this year his pupils have made their own cave paintings and clay facsimiles of prehistoric tools, and were treated to a demonstration by a master flint-knapper. While they painted, Tom read instalments to them from Michelle Paver's Wolf Brother, a wonderful evocation of a boy's adventure 6,000 years ago.  I understand the children were captivated by the story.

The Inheritors is a book that demands one's full attention, which it richly deserves. It whets the appetite for more of the good stuff: I've been to my bookshelf to look out my copy of Golding's Lord of the Flies, read at school but not for decades, and also Clive King's classic Puffin Stig of the Dump, about a caveman encountered by a small 20th Century boy.

Long live story-tellers!


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Bummeln in Bavaria

17/8/2014

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Over the last few years we have met plenty of people who are drawn back, year after year, to the Austrian Tyrol, with its clean air, friendly people, peace and quiet, and beautiful lakes and mountains. We seem to have joined them, but this year we opted to stay over the border in Ruhpolding, Bavaria. We were lucky in our small hotel, half an hour’s walk from the town centre, among quiet meadows.

A hundred yards or so from where we stayed was a spring, where all comers can fill their bottles (a contribution is requested, and honesty box provided). We went most evenings, and often met locals who had driven there for their weekly supply. My German is rusty, but it’s always a pleasure to be able to exchange some friendly words, though so many Germans are keen to practise their English!

We wandered further on one evening and found a signpost for a 3¾ hour walk to the top of Hochfelln, which seemed like a good idea for the next day. We packed our rucksacks with water and a Seed Stacked Flapjack bar (top emergency snack!), rain jacket and trousers, and set off. It was an uphill hike, with no easy downhills to speak of, through meadows, woods, and at one point our very narrow track ran along the edge of a steep hillside (I avoided looking down!). The simple pleasures of looking up through green leaves, of standing below ancient rock-faces, of exerting your legs, lungs and backs to the point of breathlessness, of watching a butterfly land on your hand to taste the salt in your sweat, of standing by a mountain-stream and listening to it rushing along, are profound. There is something joyful about hiking – human beings aren’t built to sit at computer screens in stuffy rooms all day!

When we finally got to the top of the Hochfelln we were intrigued to see Alpine Choughs for the first time, patrolling the café tables like so many Trafalgar Square pigeons!


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Alpine Chough
We took a different route down, and for the last leg found ourselves on a zig-zagging road. The storm clouds seen in the far distance from the top of the Hochfelln were catching up. A car went by, stopped and reversed. A couple on their way home to Reit in Winkl, who had seen us further up the mountain (two British people in shorts, socks and sunhats, surely inconspicuous!!), asked if we would like a lift for the last couple of miles to Ruhpolding. “Oh yes please!” I said.

The majority of local folk we encountered were charming and friendly. Some of our fellow British guests at the hotel expressed surprise at how warm, amiable and humorous they found the Germans they met. Well, they say travel broadens the mind – another national stereotype happily disproved!

Wherever we venture, I always like to search out any local war memorials. We found one halfway up the hill to St Georg’s Church, which apparently had recently been renovated after some years of neglect. There was a beautiful pieta inside the chapel, and a mural on the wall showing a young soldier taking his leave of his family – a reminder, if one was needed, that in all the countries involved in the two World Wars, there were homes in places like this where sons, husbands and fathers would never again be returning home to help bring in the harvest.  In the Heimatmuseum there are two more panels remembering the war-dead, and these feature enamelled photographs, as do so many graves in mainland Europe.


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Aubrey & Maturin

2/8/2014

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PictureLord Nelson
On this day in 1798, Lord Nelson destroyed the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile, cutting off supplies to the army of Napoleon in Egypt.  Although Nelson’s Column still stands in the centre of Trafalgar Square, and his magnificent tomb can still be seen in the Crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, with the passing of over 200 years since his death during  the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, few babies, if any, are now named after Britain’s once most adored hero (though of course, one of the world’s other most adored heroes, the eponymous Nelson Mandela, passed away and was universally mourned last December).

Patrick O’Brian’s fictional hero Jack Aubrey was wounded at the Battle of the Nile, and often expresses his great reverence for Nelson, with whom he once dined as a young officer. I think I first came across O’Brian’s series of Aubrey & Maturin novels at the Hawkenbury Allotment Holders’ summer show in Tunbridge Wells’ Dunorlan Park, when a little pile of crisp paperbacks on a book-stall with enticing pictures of sailing-ships on the covers called to me and I handed over a couple of quid.

I was hooked from the start. There’s something about these books that makes me feel deeply happy. I can’t really explain it - I don’t know how to sail, and crossing the English Channel on a P&O ferry in only the slightest choppy weather turns me a light shade of green. I‘m ignorant of any significant naval ancestors (though surely practically every British citizen must have them!); the nearest I can get to a family connection is Dad’s role in The Onedin Line as James Onedin’s crusty old father-in-law.  And yet I have re-read these books more than any others in my possession. I guess though, that there’s no big mystery here - what catches at my heart and imagination is the superb quality of Patrick O’Brian’s writing.

Many people say that there’s something of Jane Austen in these naval adventures set in the early nineteenth-century, and certainly, the subtly-layered portraits of characters and situations bring her to mind, but there is also the deep learning behind the work, the thrilling accounts of dangers at sea, the references, through Maturin’s character, to politics, scientific and philosophical developments, and last but not least, the enduring friendship, through many difficulties, of its two main protagonists. 

I met an older lady once at a book club meeting who rolled her eyes when I mentioned the Aubrey-Maturin books. “Oh,” she said, “My husband has all of them on top of his dresser in our bedroom, never stops reading ‘em...”. And I heard once of a Patrick O’Brian ‘Widows’ Club in the West Indies, whose members’ husbands are always off re-enacting the book’s battles and manoeuvres in their sailing boats. My ambitions don’t stretch that far, but I must make an effort to bump The Victory at Portsmouth and the Chatham Historic Dock-Yard off my wish-list.

When I was younger, you could wait years for a movie to come round on the box. These days you can have an allocated shelf for favourite DVDs, and surely most of us has a film we put on when the old man or woman is away, and we’re free to watch in contented solitude. My husband, a man of discernment and wit in so many ways (tee hee), often reaches for There’s Something About Mary once I’m out of the way. I always watch Peter Weir’s wonderful rendition of Master and Commander. I saw it first on the big screen, thankfully, as it deserves at least one viewing at the size it was made for, but it still thrills me every time I see it on my old tv.

A couple of weeks ago we drove down to Hastings to see my Mum, and stopped off in the town to get some shopping. I was delighted to realise, seeing all the booted and tri-cornered families streaming towards the Old Town, that it was Dress Like a Pirate Day,  and even more excited to find, in a secondhand bookshop, a copy of The Thirteen-Gun Salute, the next unread Aubrey-Maturin book in the series.

Roll on Summer Holidays and uninterrupted reading time! 


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    Lifelong bookworm, love writing too. Have been a theatrical agent and reflexologist among other things, attitude to life summed up by Walt Whitman's MIRACLES.

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