Judith Johnson
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Through A Glass, Darkly

29/9/2012

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PictureBritish soldier's kit, Historiale Museum, Peronne
Last year, I accompanied a group of A Level history students from Wales around Berlin for a week. We covered a lot of guided visits including Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, the Jewish Gedenkmal (Memorial Museum), the Wannsee Villa (where the Final Solution programme was decided on), the German History Museum, the Topographie des Terrors (a museum about the victims of the Gestapo built on the site of the demolished SS Headquarters), and last but not least, the chilling former Stasi Prison in Genslerstrasse. The students and teachers departed on their coach and I flew back. On the plane home I started to read the newspaper and came across the account of Anders Breivik's rampage in Norway. It was all finally too much: tears began to roll down my cheeks, and I couldn't stop them. The friendly couple sitting next to me gently enquired if I was OK, and I said that I would be soon, but all the things I'd seen that week, all the evidence and stories of human darkness, horror and suffering, had to come out somehow. 

I spent three days last week visiting war cemeteries and museums in Ypres and the Somme. I was lucky enough to be part of a group which was being shown new exhibitions by   curators and guides with a view to encouraging visitors, so we had excellent guides and I learnt a lot more about the overall effects of the First World War in these areas, not the least of which, of course, was the enormous number of casualties. 
 
We must have stood and looked at graves numbering in their many thousands, let alone the
memorials to the missing, including the Menin Gate and Thiepval. I don't think anyone can be immune to the emotional impact of visiting these cemeteries - I certainly find it exhausting, but am always grateful to have had the opportunity to go there.  
 
We visited Pheasant Wood Cemetery at Fromelles, the first new Commonwealth War Graves
Cemetery for 80 years, where the Australian in our party found herself in tears. She had no idea of the numbers of Australians buried around there. There is something about standing by graves, and seeing the landscape where the men fought and died, that brings home to you what history books can only obliquely convey. The men buried here were all killed on one day, mown down by machine guns. They lay in No Man's Land, and as Commonwealth forces were forbidden to risk their lives going out to bring them back for burial, it was German soldiers who went out at night to collect the bodies, and bury them in a mass grave, which has only recently been discovered.
 
These are deeds which should not pass away, names that must not wither
are the words carved on one gravestone there, in a personal message from the family.
This kind of sums up why I researched and wrote Southborough War Memorial. I also always try,  itineraries allowing, to visit any of the Southborough men's graves that I can,  and this time I was able to see those of Henry Moon, William Henry Godsmark, and Thomas Vinall at Lijssenthoek Cemetery outside Poperinghe. This cemetery was formed to bury men who were brought into the Hospital next to it, so all the men buried here actually died here, rather than being re-interred from smaller cemeteries, as is often the case. There's an excellent new exhibit here, showing the progress of casualties from the battlefield, through casualty clearing stations and on to field hospitals, and sometimes, back home.
 
I got home late on Saturday night, and spent Sunday catching up on food shopping, putting the washing in etc, and then back to work. But I forgot about Berlin, and the backlash I'd experienced then, until a few nights later, when I woke weeping from nightmares, and disturbed my husband with my sobs. I'd been dreaming of something wicked and man-made stalking through the landscape. Driving home from work that day, I'd heard reports on the radio of very young children being tortured and murdered in Syria. Too much awfulness on top of the weekend's catalogue of death and loss: letters from mothers searching for missing sons after the Somme battles; the Chinese labourers' graves, of those who had died of disease after clearing the battlefields of decaying corpses; the hotel in the Somme, where I felt the ghostly echo of all the Northumberland Fusiliers slaughtered even before they reached the Front Line and buried nearby; the sight of High Wood in the distance, where the piles of dead and ordinance have never been cleared, but just sealed off; the huge French cemetery at Notre Dame de Lorette, where, in one chamber, coffins of unknown soldiers are laid out next to a child's coffin full of ashes of French deportees, brought back from Auschwitz, and the dreadful history of Chemin des Dames, the French equivalent of the Somme in some ways, where only 10 trees were left at the end of the First World War in an area of 400 hectares.  The list goes on...
 
I am an optimist generally - more Pickwick than Puddleglum - but my interest in history   sometimes causes me to dwell too long on the dark side. I have then to reflect on the other side of humanity, and there are many examples. I needed something to help me back to sleep last night, and what came to mind, and to my aid, was the simple sentence, "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee" and the image which is, for me, one of the most realised manifestations of love made visible, as portrayed by Ford Maddox Brown in his painting of Christ Washing St Peter's feet. I will be visiting Gent in December, and I understand that the painting is on loan there from the National Gallery. I hope to have time to see it, and in this instance, to look upon the light. 

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Remembering Pablo Casals

23/9/2012

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PictureCasals, Cortot & Thibaud
The first I heard of Pablo Casals was in my 20s, when my brother Jonny sat me down to listen to the 1974 CBS Classics LP: Pablo Casals - Song of the Birds and   other pieces. We were enthralled. Along with the beautiful music, you could hear the great maestro, now in his 90s, breathing heavily as he drew the bow   across his cello. In the years that followed, I would return to this music, especially the exquisite Cant dels Ocells, always hearing something deeply moving in it. When I went to work at Benenden School in Kent for some years, I was thrilled to discover that Casals had played there in the 1930s for the girls and teachers, as a member of the world famous trio comprising Alfred Cortot, the pianist, Jacques Thibaud, the violinist, and himself. This was before the British government's failure to go to the aid of the defending Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War led Casals, a great Catalan patriot and humanist, to declare that he would never play in the UK again.
 
Thomas Mann wrote of Casals: "For me his existence is a source of joy. He is one of those artists who come to the rescue of humanity's honour".
 
I have a number of notebooks and scrapbooks where I've collected things that have had a positive impact on my life, or just plain make me smile - my website is a happy continuation of this habit - and the following is a wonderful quote from Joys and Sorrows by Pablo
Casals, which saw me safely through my son's schooldays:
 
"Sometimes I look about me with a feeling of complete dismay. In the confusion which   afflicts the world today. I see on all sides a disrespect for the very values of life. Each second, we live in a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that never was before and will never be again. And what do we teach our children in school? We teach them that two and two make four and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the world there is no other child exactly like you. In the  millions of years that have passed there has never been another child like you. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must cherish one another. You must work - we all must work - to make this a world worthy of its children."
 
I have one other thing for which to thank Pablo Casals: my son repaid me one Christmas for all the weighty tomes I'd bought him in the past with two whoppers, one of which was a second-hand copy of Pablo Casals: A Biography by HL Kirk. I dutifully read it, and since then it has served as an excellent device for wedging our bedroom sash-window open on hot summer nights!


 Pau Carlos Salvador Defillo de Casals : Born 29 December 1876 in Vendrell,
  Catalonia, died 22 October 1973 in San Juan, Puerto Rico


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When Fledglings Fly the Nest

15/9/2012

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A friend of mine will be delivering her son to his university hall of residence this weekend. I remember how I felt when we dropped our son off at his lodgings in Wimbledon for his first term at art school. We helped him in with his cases, boxes of CDs, books, art materials etc, bounced on his bed to test the mattress, peeped inside the wardrobe and the bathroom, and then took our leave. I waved a cheery goodbye, turned round and walked towards the car and promptly burst into tears! Luckily my husband drove the 35 miles home as I sobbed and snuffled beside him.  

I had a similar reaction at most of the significant partings we meet along the road to independence for our children: the first day at the child-carers, at nursery, and primary school, and probably one day I will cry at my son's wedding!
 
But we can't help how we feel, and I hope my friend won't choke her tears down if they come. They do come back to see you, some even move back in! And, although not all mother-child relationships are as good as they could be, it is a unique, immutable bond. 

I first came across the following passage from Kahlil Gibran's wonderful classic The Prophet when I was at grammar school. As is always the case when something speaks directly to our condition, as Quakers say, I knew immediately that for me, it was a truth. I copied it out for my favourite teacher, and in the years since I've copied it out for quite a few others. I still love it.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, 
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
But seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
As living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
And He bends you with His might
That His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
So He loves also the bow that is stable.





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Olympic Scarecrows

7/9/2012

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Picture
A lot of villages in Kent have intriguing histories - particularly the ones in the High Weald. Speldhurst has a 13th century pub, The George and Dragon, where, it is rumoured, soldiers who fought at Agincourt stopped off for a pint on their way home. One of its Vicars was the father of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement. The Church itself boasts some beautiful stained-glass windows by Burne-Jones and William Morris.  

But there are also 21st century charms here.  I drive through the village regularly -  it is part of my daily commute (see High Weald on my Travel page) - and as the seasons turn, there are many things, if you keep your eyes open, to enjoy and be thankful for. There is a particularly beautiful 'handkerchief-tree' which blooms every Spring, at least one resident picks the old apple-trees in his garden every autumn and leaves them in a box at his gate for passers-by to help themselves for free, and the lollipop-lady who sees the children safe across the road on their way to primary school is unfailingly patient and smiling.
 
At this time of year, co-inciding with the flower show, there is also the lovely surprise of spotting the village scarecrows dotted around. The first one that caught my eye this week was a diver, poised mid-air under an oak tree, followed by a horse and rider emerging from a hedge, a bride and groom under the church lych-gate, a pair of feet disappearing into a bush, and Mo Farah! 
  
Seems like Speldhurst has definitely been wowed, as have so many of us, by the London Olympics this year!

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Summer break in the Tyrol

1/9/2012

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PictureSoll, Tyrol
I have never been a fan of theme parks - their fast-food-style offering of entertainment is not my cup of tea. When our son was small we could be found walking round Silbury Hill, exploring the standing stones of Avebury Circle, or fossicking around King Henry's Hunting Lodge Museum on the edge of Epping Forest. As a happy consequence of this, as he grew, he largely preferred to spend hours making or drawing real things to watching TV.  
 
As a boy, he would have been in seventh heaven in the Wilder Kaiser region of the Austrian Tyrol,
including the villages of Soll, Ellmau, Scheffau and Going, where we recently spent our summer holidays.

The valley is like one enormous outdoor playground, for children of all ages, as the saying goes! It has a very useful free yellow bus, the Kaiserjet, which regularly shuttles holiday guests to the area between Soll and Going. If you buy a summer lift-pass, as we did - you have easy and cost-effective access, via chair-lifts and gondolas - to the mountains, any time in the day you feel like a ride. Alternatively, you can walk up them for free.

On the slopes above each village there is, at the mid-way station, a marvellous children's area. At the Brandstadl, above Scheffau, there is a woodland playground with wonderful swings and tree-houses. At Hexenwasser, above Soll, a fantastic chain of pools and other water features has been constructed. Small children can be  seen working hard at damming water in wooden troughs, paddling in streams of mountain water running over pebbles,  doing all the things children love to spend hours at, wrapped up in the space that their imaginations have made. If you get there early enough, even middle-aged children like me can have a go (one morning I paddled through all of the pools, played on the ringing-singing bowl, walked along the bridge made of a whole tree-trunk, and felt thoroughly restored and recreated!).

There are also very attractive places where you can stop for something to eat and or drink at reasonable prices - Austrian local home-cooked delicacies, delicious cakes, a coffee or a beer. Our favourite dish was the gorgeous Nettle and Spinach dumplings (Brennesselspinatknodel) in butter sauce with parmesan at the Gipfelrestaurant on the Hohe Salve above Soll. Probably at their very best on a cold rainy day with the stove going, but with this year's hot and bright weather we weren't whingeing!  One remarkable thing about the Tyrol is the uniformly spotlessly-clean toilets. The Gipfelrestaurant's facilities have a
particularly spectacular view of the surrounding mountain peaks (described by
one wit as "the loos with the views").

Picture
There are all kinds of free activities offered by the local tourist offices. We had a great day's hike at the feet of the Wilder Kaiser massif with our guide Cornelia Miedler and a friendly young father, Wolfgang, and his two sons from Stuttgart. Connie showed us some of the plants we could eat safely and pointed out a couple of poisonous ones; she shared some folk remedies with us that her grandfather had passed on to her. The boys shook our hands and introduced themselves shyly, then ran along beside us without complaint for the next four hours, enjoying, as we did, the marvellous feeling of being out in the sun and air, hearing only the birds, bees and occasional passing "Gruss Gott!", and getting out of breath as we puffed up and down the hills.  Another guided tour took us round the Kneipp Trail of Scheffau, where our leader Chris gave us the run-down on Sebastian Kneipp, a Bavarian priest and one of the founders of the naturopathic medicine movement in the 19th century. Father Kneipp used cold-water treatments, (written of in old texts before his time), to cure
himself of tuberculosis, and went on to develop his own principles. We walked along paths laid with pebbles, sand, wood-bark; we waded through cold-water pools and peat-bogs; we breathed in air in an outdoor room where salted spring water ran over cut branches of blackthorn and pine; we stuck our heads into a 
large hole in a giant granite stone and hummed; we lay in a meditation space and looked up at the trees.
PictureHiking with Connie
The Tyrol has been in the tourist and hotel business for centuries now, and it shows. We stayed at the Hotel Tyrol in Soll - a family business, as most are, established by the current generation's grandfather. The hotel is cosy, clean, welcoming and relaxed, with sauna etc and swimming-pool, and a well-patronised children's playground. The food was fresh, delicious, generously-portioned and included plenty of Austrian dishes. The village brass band gives an excellent free open-air concert once a week, and there is a weekly 'village get-together' with craft stalls, zither-music, and
local food and drink available. The village church also hosts a weekly concert featuring visiting musicians. The church-yard includes a memorial to the war-dead - a reminder, if one were needed, that every community bears painful losses in military conflicts.

As in every holiday resort, there are trips laid on to sights and cities. When we visited two years ago, we enjoyed the stunning Krimml waterfalls, the salt-mine near Salzburg, and Innsbruck, which are all well-worth seeing. On this occasion, we made just one rainy-day trip to hear the mighty Heldenorgel at nearby Kufstein - an astonishing open-air organ, built in 1931 to commemorate the Austrian and German war dead of the Great War, and now
of course including those of the Second World War, which is played every day at 12pm.

This year we eschewed the trips, feeling powerfully drawn to the hills, walking through meadows where farmers and their families were mowing, drinking from mountain springs, listening to cowbells. After the year's round of constant information overload - the day-job, writing, texting, social networking etc - I found, to my amazement, that I had even  temporarily completely lost my appetite for reading books, previously unheard of! I listened to my body, heart and soul - and gratefully took it easy, standing and staring, being fully present in the moment. I can recommend it!
 
If you would like to see some more photos ... 

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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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