Lakeside - a legend right on my doorstep

High time I wrote something here so – what comes to mind?

First off, Happy New Year to you! Never before can I remember such a start to a year, when we as a nation hardly know what to wish for any more. For Parliament to have broken up for their Christmas recess has left us with the biggest, most complex end of chapter cliffhanger - and who knows how this political saga will unravel?

Closer to home - for me at least – I thought I’d just drop you a note about an article I wrote for the January issue of Surrey Life.  It has been in the shops since around 20 January and can still be found in Waitrose and a few other discerning Surrey shops   Or, you can subscribe online. 

You may know I used to write a regular column for the magazine on people who breathe life into villages and help to bring small communities together – separate incidentally, from the Surrey Community Heroes awards where achievements are slightly different. It was a fabulous theme for me, getting out and about unearthing and helping to acknowledge salt of the earth types, some of whom have indeed gone on to gain further recognition and awards. You can find all of these in the Surrey Life archives under the title Notes from a Small Village. 

I guess it ran its course and after a couple of years this wound up but then I was able to pitch for longer features. I wrote an article on Surrey choirs in August which made quite a splash on the pages.

The Tardis comes to mind - inside, the cabaret suite is HUGE!

The one in January is about Lakeside Complex in Frimley Green and the life and times of its founder and owner, Bob Potter OBE, who has just celebrated his 90 birthday. I won’t tell you what this is about exactly as this would spoil what holds a few surprises for the average reader. Need I say more?

Just this - it was tricky to write because of the timing. Bob Potter and his team were waiting to hear from the British Darts Organisation for confirmation that they would be hosting the January 2019 championship –  as it has for the past 33 years. For legal and contractual reasons to do with TV coverage they were prevented from talking to me until word was officially out and up on their website. 

The editor only wanted the article to go into January issue if they had this Darts contract to give it a topical hook.  After a few failed interviews, where people did not materialise  – which at the time I could not quite understand – I saw Bob the day before the editor's deadline date. By this time I had virtually written the article!!

Anyway, it all turned out OK in the end – so I hope you enjoy reading it, especially those who live in the area.  My husband and I, and son who happened to be visiting, were invited to attend a show – which was Anita Harris. It was a class act – with excellent supporting musicians. The only sad thing was that there were so few people in the audience. I hope next time I go there will be more of a crowd – this club that had its heyday in the 1980s still has a lot to offer. For me – within walking distance. How could I have missed it all these years? I could kick myself!

Coincidentally there is an article in Surrey Life on Anita Harris. 

By another strange and most unlikely coincidence, in early December my husband and I were on the cabaret stage where so many big stars of yesteryear have trodden the boards, performing 16 songs with Camberley Rock Choir.  Supported by family and friends of a large choir this had a better attendance!

I do hope more people will delve into the Lakeside programme and perhaps find an event that might tempt them to get a table together with friends for a night out in the village!  

Fabrication not fiction! weaving update ...

My past couple of blog posts have been serious – perhaps too much for some, I don’t know.

Time to lighten the mood then! It’s a while since I issued a weaving update. A few Facebook people politely expressed interested in this so here's more evidence of looming madness - a few home crafted products, as our house and family members are becoming somewhat swathed in various tartans and plaids.  My previous post last year.

I find it sadly therapeutic seeing a medley of colours grow into an item that I know for sure no-one else in the world has ever seen!! Very much not mass-produced!

These carry on from where I left off last time. Yes, we have too many cushions.

After making a pale fine baby blanket I embraced the brightest colours I could find for a lightly padded cot blanket or play mat.

Colours inspired by native American Indian craft. 

... this was the soft, baby blanket with matching, tiny, prem-baby garments.

Now, like it or not, all family members will be receiving for birthdays a scarf to suit their personalities. My lucky son-in-law was first on the calendar and I had thought black, white, grey with a hint of red, but daughter put me right, assuring me that he is a muddy-brown, muddy-green with a hint of mustard kind of guy.

Combined the usual with a length of fabric I had in the cupboard for years - kitchen chair cushions, lightly padded but quite flat.

 oh - another view of the one above ...

 and the blanket of many colours folded ready for gift-wrapping!

 Yeah, for Christmas!!

I like to try and make square cushions symmetrical in design; so unless you have a very sharp, photographic memory, the rows need to be recorded on paper as once you get started the length gets rolled up on the loom and disappears out of sight.

This one is to go with bedroom colour scheme. 

Enough? for now anyway ...

Thanks for bearing with me.

When I see Michael Portillo on TV I'm inspired to wonder if he might like a scarf woven in all his jacket and trousers colourways. What do you think?

A rapport with Kazuo Ishiguro?

Dare I claim such a thing? Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, as you may know. I have just re-read his early novels written in the nineteen-eighties, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, two short but perfectly formed novels that have aged on my bookshelf to the point where they are now falling apart!

I was totally transfixed listening to his Nobel Laureate speech given in Stockholm, when he explained how memories do not just fade but also may be coloured, even distorted by time and later assumptions. He sees reality as being at best fragile and refers to Marcel Proust’s ‘Memories of Things Past’ – I found this exciting as I refer to this in my novel  No Gypsies Served when my half-Gypsy hero decides to write his life story and reflects upon a quotation from this very book. This comes close to the end of chapter 2.

The following day Dunstan switched on his computer with a heavy heart, recalling books he had read in his ‘literary phase’ in his thirties, and in particular Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, or, as he read it, Remembrance of Things Past and he had recently come across a quotation from it: We find a little of everything in our memory, it is a sort of pharmacy, a sort of chemical laboratory, in which our groping hand may come to rest, now on a sedative drug, now on a dangerous poison. 

Indeed. Well, he had started something he knew he must follow through but his reasons for trying to unearth memories, revisit his childhood and those troubled days as a younger man, had changed substantially. Initially it was to please Kay. How feeble and pathetic that seemed now. He had to chuckle. It was a poor reason to commit to such a massive undertaking. 

Since dipping a toe in those turbulent waters, feeling their danger and strength suck him in, he could see it was no mean task to rekindle emotions and recall harrowing scenes of his life that he had conveniently tucked away for so long.

The sentiment in the Proust quotation describes well how Ishiguro's characters' recollections are sometimes unreliable. Delusion, memories that shift and slide form a recurring theme in his novels.

I personally love his disdain for genre, as being mostly a marketing tool, and indeed he sees the barriers now breaking down, as genres merge more and more.  I wrote a couple of blog posts in November 2009 on this vexed question  Still bugged by genres and how it can sometimes seem like the tail wagging the dog; so this was music to my ears when I tuned into an interview  and heard his thoughts. (Where he also confessed to having problems with setting – not that you’d notice!) Like many writers he likes freedom in writing, not the confines of a particular label and in his latest book The Buried Giant he uses myth and fantasy. 

You might be forgiven for thinking that he was brought up in Japan when you read his first two novels, but he and his parents came over to England when he was five years old, so as a young man he felt largely ignorant of his homeland. Of course the aftermath of the 1941 nuclear bomb in Nagasaki, where he was born, was not only well documented but must have been in the background of many a family conversation, especially where his grandparents were concerned. He came to realise that the old way of life he could vaguely remember, mostly through stories he had heard as a young child, may have been to some extent an ‘emotional construct’. This idea seems to flow through his characters’ struggle to grasp memories with clarity. Also the switches in chronology – now so commonplace in fiction were not the norm thirty years ago.

Remains of the Day, Man Booker Prize winner 1989, and Never Let me Go have both been made into films and he finds TV and cinema exciting. Literature in its printed form must offer something special in its storytelling to compete culturally with the screen. He believes that a novel can build up gradually to achieve a satisfactory resolution, rather than is found in many films, where the viewer’s attention is grabbed boldly only to find that the momentum may peter out. This is my understanding of what I have heard him say and, again, is something with which I dare to whole-heartedly agree.   

An Uncounted People, a film for Holocaust Day

Yesterday morning I went along to the Surrey History Centre in Woking, Surrey, to a rare showing of an award-winning Canadian film, A People Uncounted for Holocaust Memorial Day. Filmed in 11 countries, it focuses on the 500,000 Roma who were murdered. The title suggests that the number is an underestimation, as they went unrecognised until relatively recently – not until 1982 in Germany. In the Nuremberg trials no Roma Gypsies were called to testify.

The word Porrajmos means ‘devouring’ or ‘rape' and is the word for the Romani holocaust. It is not just the numbers that make this film so powerful, but the dark, harrowing detail from first-hand accounts by survivors who are inevitably diminishing, since they tend to be over 90 or even 100 years old.

The Roma are the largest ethnic minority group in Europe – and the diaspora of Gypsies is the largest in Surrey today. Along with Jews, disabled people, resisters to the regime, and homosexuals, they were systematically oppressed, persecuted, and finally gassed and cremated.

You may not have heard of this documentary. Despite it being five years old, it might not have attracted a wide audience yet I would guess that anyone who has seen it would feel impelled to recommend it to others. It is important for, as Dr Ian Hancock, highly respected author of We Are the Romani People and Director of the Romani Archives at the University of Texas, chillingly says in the film ‘It could happen again’. He would not say this lightly.

The film reminds us of other genocides around the world, both current and recent, and of the appalling racism and hate that still exists between different peoples. As many news bulletins confirm, hate crime is on the increase rather than something the human race has resolved and consigned to history.

It shows shocking images and reminders of events of which we are perhaps aware but have become dangerously complacent. I make no apology for recalling here some horrendous facts from the film. Branded like animals with a Z for Gypsy, denied basic rights, the Roma were referred to as vermin. Nazi eugenics is well known but the Institute for Race Hygiene in 1939 worked on the premise that the Roma were born to criminality, lazy and so on. Their facial features were measured and children who did not measure up, literally, were deported to Auschwitz. A respected child psychologist, who died in just 1966, carried out this work.

Before the 1939 Olympics, the Gypsies, Sinti, Roma, were moved to live next to a garbage dump with nothing.  How often have Gypsies and Travellers been tucked away on unhealthy, toxic and poorly drained land?

A survivor from 2,800 people in Vienna herded onto trains tells how a blacksmith stayed behind because he was deemed useful. Local ‘social services’ deported people to avoid paying for their upkeep. Death was caused by forced labour. Massed killings by poisonous gas followed later. Auschwitz had what was called a ‘Gypsy Family Camp’ and about 60 metres away from the buildings into which they were crammed, were the crematoriums. They arrived daily, to be gassed in 8 – 10 minutes, and burned. When the crematoriums were overflowing, the people still alive would be driven into forest or field to pits where rubbish was burned and forced to simply jump in.

A 105 year-old survivor tells of how 5,000 mostly old people, robbed of their possessions, were transported to Transnistria. They had nothing, no water and drank from puddles. Another survivor tells of how Roma were loaded onto cardboard boats. They were shot, the bodies eaten by crows and dogs. A man was made to rape his own mother. There was nowhere to sleep or to eat and they lived for two years in that misery. These are all fragments of what the survivors tell us in the film. The Final Solution was signed by Himmler in March 1938 but the suffering that preceded this is largely undocumented which is what makes this film so very significant. Moreover, after the war, by which time 90% had perished, the remainder had nowhere to live, no papers, nothing and stayed in the concentration camps. Thereafter, with children unable to read or write, they were at a continual disadvantage as they struggled to merely survive. What we must remember is that, even today Roma in Europe and Gypsies in the UK live in the shadow of this dark history.

A man describes what it was like to be herded onto the cattle trucks, upright like pencils stacked in a box. They could not move. An exhausted woman could no longer hold her child and had to let the child slide down to the floor, then could not bend enough to pick up the child and they were both eventually trampled to death.

Then there was the medical experimentation in Dr Mengele’s laboratory, for which Roma children were used. One survivor tells of how the eyes were removed from a living 12 year-old, without anaesthetic.

Surrey has one of the largest Romany Gypsy and Traveller populations in the UK, still suffering from inequalities that racism brings – in education, employment, health, and above all, homelessness, which underpins everything else and is becoming a massive problem for the Gypsy and Traveller community.

I began exploring this very problem over ten years ago and then wrote Gypsies Stop tHere. I am uncertain as to whether certain issues have improved but I do know of great work that is going on and will write about this another time.

The Surrey Gypsy Traveller Communities Forum has bought the rights to show this film. As Jeremy Harte, of Bourne Hall Museum in Epsom, puts it, ‘As ethnic intolerance flares up in Europe, this film sheds light on this unique culture while presenting the Roma tale as emblematic of the world’s legacy of racism and genocide. Closer to home, this film presents a powerful and thought-provoking challenge to what the Commission for Racial Equality has described as ‘the last acceptable form of racism’ in our own country.’

To end, I quote from a talk given by one of two survivors who spoke movingly in a Memorial Service that took place just before the film yesterday. He quoted from Edmund Burke, the 18^th century Irish politician, who said: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.’

If I ever hear of another showing of this film, I will let you know.