Judith Johnson
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Give a hug for Christmas

24/12/2012

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I recently lost my mother-in-law, who I first met when I was nineteen. I lived in London at the time, and had just started going out with my husband to be. He was going home to Wales for Christmas, and when Mam and Dad heard that I would be on my own for the holidays, they immediately invited me to spend the time with them. I caught the coach down to Swansea, where Martin and his father met me at the bus station. Dad held out his hand and greeted me jovially with, "Welcome to Wales, Judy!" and later I enjoyed an equally warm reception from Mam.

In the years since, Mam has been a consistently supportive, loving presence in my life, and a wonderful grandmother to our son. She and I sometimes got on each other's nerves, no-one's perfect! She didn't like reading, for example, so I always had the comment "Oh! So we're in the library now, are we?" whenever I got a book out on holiday, which used to rattle my cage, but we always made things up, and we had lots of good times. I valued her kindness, generosity and patience. She was steadfast, a stalwart. She and Dycu (Welsh for
Grandad) had my son Tom to stay for all of his summers. Dycu passed away seventeen years ago, and Mam stoically carried on without him.

This will be our first Christmas season without seeing Mam since 1975. I miss her. And, as always when a loved one passes away, cannot help reflecting on ways I could have been more loving. In my mind, Mam's faults have flown up and away, like chaff in the wind, and what is left is the memory of the goodness at the heart of her.

Tolstoy wrote in his diary as a very young man:

 "The powerful means for achieving true happiness in life is - and without any dogmas - to spread out from oneself, in every direction, like a spider, a whole spider's web of love, and to catch in it everything that comes along - whether it is an old woman or a child, a girl or a
policeman."

At this time of celebration of love and light, reading this encourages me to try and give as many hugs, kisses, pats, and expressions of warmth and goodwill, as I can. Christmas is one of those times when you can feel extra lonely and unloved if you're on the outside of things.


 

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The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

15/12/2012

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PictureRobert Tressell's lodgings, West Hill, Hastings
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is one of those
books I often saw on bookshelves in the 1970s – but which, since I was living a fairly transient life, I never got round to reading. Recently I came by a copy and recommended that we read it in our local book group. I was really blown away by it, and it has coloured my thinking ever since.
 
It truly is an amazing achievement. The novel was written by Robert Noonan, while he was working as a signwriter for various building firms in Hastings, Sussex. He had been born and raised in Ireland, but came to England from South Africa at the turn of the 20th century.  He used the pen-name Robert Tressell. You get a picture from the book of the terrible conditions in which he was working and living, and the mind boggles at the huge effort it must have  taken to write this epic in his spare time. He wanted the book to be a ‘socialist documentary’ based on real people and events, and it’s obvious that he wanted it not only to be read but also to change people’s thinking. Tragically, he never saw this fine piece of work in print himself. After it was rejected by several publishers, he decided to emigrate to Canada in 1910. Sadly, he fell ill and died from tuberculosis in 1911, aged forty, before he could sail from Liverpool.
 
As a literary work, the book is sometimes repetitive, contrived and autodidactic, but to me these things pale into insignificance in the light of Robert Tressell’s white-hot passion to communicate his message: his portrayal of working men’s lives, and his belief in the possibility of changing things. As I was reading, I often thought of the men who would have
been living and working at this time, just before the First World War. I have read for example that many men who signed up for the War were often very pleased  to be given regular meals, warm clothes and decent boots, so impoverished were their backgrounds.  And some of the characters described in the book would have marched off in 1914 to join the ranks, just as the men on the Southborough War Memorial in my home town, such as
Frederick Somers, plumber, John Richard Rogers, decorator, and Charles James Scott, blacksmith at the High Brooms Brick & Tile Company.
 
At one point in the book Tressell describes a man who is found lying unconscious in the middle of a country road, and dies shortly thereafter of bronchitis and want of food. This recalled to me another Southborough World War One casualty, Thomas Handley, who died aged nineteen in the Hythe disaster in 1915. His mother had walked all the way from London to Tunbridge Wells in 1901 with her three children in a pram, to make a new home there. Her husband, a former railway porter, had died in the Boer War in 1900, and she was living on nine shillings and sixpence a week.

Tressell is unsparing in his vivid portraits of greed and opportunism in those of all classes, but the genuinely good men and women in his novel are predominantly working-class. Not until halfway through the book is there any mention of the middle classes in a positive light: “Others of these visiting ladies were middle-aged, unmarried women with small private incomes – some of them well-meaning, compassionate, gentle creatures who did this work   because they sincerely desired to help others, and they knew of no better way.” I wonder if this description might have applied to the members of the Fabian Women’s Group, who recorded the daily budgets of thirty families in Lambeth living on about a pound a week, and in 1913 published this record in
Round About a Pound a Week.

The town portrayed in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is named Mugsborough, but is widely acknowledged to be in reality Hastings. I lived in Hastings myself for two years in the early 1970s. I had left home at sixteen, and my first ‘digs’ was on the West Hill, just round the corner from Tressell’s lodgings. There was no heating, an outside toilet, and just one cold tap in our basement flat, and I used to go to the White Rock public baths for a hot bath
once a week. You handed over 50p to the attendant (decimalisation had just transformed the former charge of 10 shillings), and entered into a cubicle with high windows and a wooden slatted floor. A large plug was placed in the bath and hot water poured out of an outsize tap. Lovely! I always imagined that tramps and others with no hot running water available might have treated themselves to this in past times, and perhaps even Tressell himself, who knows? 
 
For those unfortunates currently living on very little in Hastings, there is a local initiative for Christmas. I hope that it will bring some light and warmth into their lives. If you would like to send them something – you can find details at http://www.survivingchristmas.co.uk/


 
 
 
 
 
 

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Flit through Belgium

5/12/2012

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I just came back from a three-day working trip to Belgium, visiting some of the Christmas markets with a very nice group of people from Hertfordshire. We made lightning visits to Leuven, Bruges, Lieges and Brussels.
 
It’s always tempting to form a negative opinion of a whole nation after encountering just a few brusque individuals, but it’s worth keeping an open mind – there are of course some grumpy folk in Belgium, but plenty of kind, warm people too, just like in every other place on earth. I went for a twenty minute pre-dawn jog around Leuven in my high-vis gear on Saturday, (having just signed up for my first half-marathon I needed to get a run in) and got quite a few surprised looks from the few people on the early morning streets. They clearly thought I was barking mad! I really enjoyed my run past the War Memorial in front of the railway station and the stunning spotlit Stadhuis (Town Hall).
 
Lieges was fun that evening, with a distinctly Belgian twist on the German Christmas markets model. I enjoyed a hot spiced apple juice, a‘saucisse curry’ with mayonnaise, bought some woollen mittens for my frozen hands, and bravely handed over my 3 euros for a solo ride on the Big Wheel! I also snapped a couple of pooches for my Dogs page!
 
Bruges looked fascinating – I was pleased to see that Sir Thomas More once visited the town. He has always interested me, not least because he had a house in Southborough, where I live (his most famous work Utopia is very nearly at the top of my book pile). 
  
I enjoyed walking round the streets surrounding the central squares of these old towns and cities, really just getting my bearings on my first visit. I went in search of the Flea Market in Brussells and came across a wonderful band busking in the old High Street. I also, to my delight, found a fab organic wholefood self-service cafe, EKXI, relaxed and friendly, in the Bourse.

I look forward to going back one day to have a closer, slower look. Obviously, there is a multitude of marvellous works of art to see in Belgium, and in particular I would love to have a guided tour of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s house in Brussels (groups only, and needs booking in advance!). I would also really like to see The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in Sint Baafskathedral in Ghent.  
 
In the meantime, here are some snapshots:

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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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