Judith Johnson
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Year of Grace

25/11/2012

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My son once remarked how whenever I approached a bookstall at a boot sale I would start to hum. I tend to hum, sing or whistle when I feel happy whether it’s a sunny morning or at any number of beautiful things around me. Books never fail to evoke this response! I read for enjoyment, to enlarge my personal knowledge of the world in which we live, through the shared experience, thought and creative imagination of others. This all sounds very serious, but I like to laugh too –  I mix up my reading,  and my tastes are eclectic.
 
My most treasured boot-sale book purchase, decades back, must definitely be The Year of Grace – Passages chosen and arranged to express a mood about the human and divine by Victor Gollancz.
 
I've read through this book many times since, just working through it slowly, one or more quotes each bedtime, and my copy is literally falling to bits now. I have marked up my favourite passages (much to the abhorrence of my husband, who hates to write in books!) and copied many of them out into a notebook of spiritual readings which I keep for times when I need inspiration, comfort or just a moment of calm reassurance.
 
My favourite part of the book, and one which I always come back to, is the section of stories of great kindness in the face of great cruelty – Third Part: The Relation of Man to Man: X. It is wonderfully moving. I quote (with thanks to the Gollancz family):
 
The following is an extract from a letter received from an Austrian Jew now in the British Pioneer Corps in the BLA. He is attached to a hospital receiving German wounded. He has been for nine months in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald: he had been hung by the wrists to a tree and had once nearly died of gangrene, Jews at that time not being allowed medical attention in concentration camps. He also has reason to believe that his old mother was taken to Poland two years ago:

"This is being written in the solitude of a ward in which I am guarding wrecked members of the Herrenvolk. It is so strange a situation that I can hardly describe what I am feeling. Loneliness is perhaps the only word for it. These are men who set out to conquer the world, and they and their kind have done unspeakable things to me and my kind, and I am supposed to hate them with all my strength, and would be right to do so according to recognised standards of human behaviour. But I cannot hate, or is it that in the face of suffering hatred is silent? So it happens that the guard is turned into a nurse, and if a man, from losing too much blood, goes out of his mind and stammers incoherently, I have to talk him to sleep again. And it sometimes happens that men try to hold my hand when I have helped them. That makes me feel lonely.
 
“Only a few lines. It is midnight, and I am going off duty after having had a busy time with that man who lost so much blood that he went crackers. He had an operation and a blood transfusion, and I was the only one able to talk to him. In the end he obeyed my orders instantly with ‘Jawohl, Herr Doktor!” Once he said 'Sie sind so ein feiner Mensch’* and then ‘Sie sind zu mir wie ein Vater'**. What shall I make of that? I can only draw one conclusion, which is that I am a terribly bad soldier and I am somehow glad about it.  
  
"The man I wrote about has died. The doctors fought for his life as if he were a celebrity.”
 
*You are a good man!
**You are like a father to me
LEFT NEWS, November 1944
  
My husband knows that gifts of book-tokens will always bring a smile to my face. I have one from my birthday I’ve been meaning to spend, and have just ordered another, more modern offering on the subject of love in response to injury: I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity by Izzeldin Abuelaish. I hope it will increase my understanding.
  

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The Love of Travel

10/11/2012

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It's Remembrance Day this weekend, and a lot of us will, in the two minutes' silence, be thinking of loved ones, past and present, who served in conflicts and lost their lives. I know from my research that many of the young men and women who embarked on journeys in war-time recalled that among other feelings, they were excited to be going abroad, and looking forward to seeing new people, places and things in foreign lands. Even those who sailed for the Dardanelles in 1915 from Southborough, young men who had possibly never even travelled to London, 30 miles away, saw it as a great adventure. My grandfather, born in the Midlands of England, who served in Egypt before he went to the Somme, bought home with him treasured long-playing records of Egyptian music.

My mother told me once that Grandpa's favourite writer was HV Morton. I was delighted to hear this, as I had years back, in my twenties, discovered HV Morton at the Compton Bookshop in Islington, and worked my way through all of his books at that time. I loved his mixture of anecdote, history and keen interest in his fellow human beings. Some of my other favourite travel writers include the wonderful Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman Lewis, and Bruce Chatwin.

In straitened times, when budgeting is called for, our annual holiday is sacrosanct. I'd rather go without meals and coffee out, that extra handbag, or almost anything else than lose my opportunity to explore a bit more of this beautiful planet.  My day job is in the travel industry, so from time to time I get to go out with a tour, or visit somewhere on a 'jolly' (familiarisation trip).  I have a wish-list (of course!), which includes:
  • cycling through the Po Valley, location of Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo stories
    galloping across the Mongolian plains
    whale-watching off the coast of America
    finding the birthplace and home of my great-great-grandmother in northern India
    travelling round the States for six months on Greyhound buses
    visiting anywhere in Russia
    taking the Rocky Mountain train tour
    seeing the Moros y Christianos fiesta in Jijona, Spain
    backpacking round the youth-hostels of Germany
    taking a dip in the seaweed baths at Strandhill, near Sligo
    watching the Northern Lights over Tromso

Of course, were I never to cross the Channel again, there is a lifetime of things I'd like to do in 'this sceptred isle'. I've never seen the great Abbeys of Yorkshire, the island of Iona, trekked along Hadrian's Wall, or walked up the gangway to HMS Victory (though I have marvelled at Nelson's tomb in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral). I am 'with child' (a term often used in the literature of his day) to look round Mr Handel's house in Mayfair. And although I lived in London for 11 years, I have never visited the Tower of London!

This  week I went along to the World Travel Market at London Excel. I did my duty, and dropped by all the stalls I needed to, in order to make or renew relations with travel industry suppliers and colleagues, but I also had a great time wandering round and seeing people from across the world, in all their variety - representatives from all the continents showing the subtle differences in physiognomy, manner, and dress.
A cause of great excitement as we approached Excel was the sighting of a cable-car across the Thames! I had not heard of this so it came as a big surprise. I and my husband are great aficionados of cable-cars and chair-lifts, so we will be beetling up to London ASAP to have a go on this! In the meantime, for fellow enthusiasts, here is a clip of a trip on the wonderful Monte Faito cable-car which we enjoyed a couple of years back when we stayed in Sorrento. You can see Vesuvius in the background. 

Happy travelling!

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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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