Words for today from World War One

Harry Patch was the last combat veteran of World War One to die. It wasn’t until he was 100 that he could speak about the war. Today is the 100th anniversary of the British declaration of that war. It was not, as declared, the war to end all wars. But it should have been.

For the past weeks the world has been watching stories of conflict. Tales from Israel and Gaza are all around us. People there are speaking.

“Others were just blown to pieces…it wasn’t a case of seeing them with a nice bullet hole in their tunic, far from it, and there I was, only 19 years old. I felt sick.” Harry Patch

“I will always remember the day it started, this war, as some people call it. For me, it is not a war; it is just bombing of Gaza. I thank God every day because I’m not afraid of these bombings but, to be honest, on the second night of the “war”, I stayed awake the whole night thinking about images of people and children who had died, or lost their homes. I kept thinking sad things about them, and wondering, “What if this war lasts for a longer time? What if my house is bombed like the others? What will I do? Will I cry or will I become mad?” Nadeen, www.voicesofgaza.com

“I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder”. Harry Patch

“Excuse me, World! I stopped believing you and calling out to you to stop the killing of my people for all you will do is send some money after it is too late; as if money can compensate the sorrow, the pain, the hurt and the lost of beloved ones. Excuse me, World! I don’t want to listen to you demanding from us to stay calm and humbly accept the mass murder of our people – I haven’t been listening to you since I sat there seeing an F16 rocket kill another sleeping house in the middle of the night.” Asma, www.voicesofgaza.com

“It wasn’t worth it. No war is worth it. No war is worth the loss of a couple of lives let alone thousands. T’isn’t worth it … the First World War, if you boil it down, what was it? Nothing but a family row. That’s what caused it. The Second World War – Hitler wanted to govern Europe, nothing to it. I would have taken the Kaiser, his son, Hitler and the people on his side … and bloody shot them. Out the way and saved millions of lives. T’isn’t worth it.” Harry Patch

“I myself didn’t shoot, my friend shot and killed him. And basically you think, you see in the United States there’s the death penalty, for every death sentence there are like a thousand appeals and convictions, and they take it very seriously, and there are judges and learned people, and there are protests and whatever. And here a 26-year-old guy, my company commander, sentenced an unarmed man to death.” Anonymous Israeli soldier, Breaking the Silence

“For eighty years I’ve never watched a war film, I never spoke of it, not to my wife. For six years, I’ve been here [in the nursing home]. Six years it’s been nothing but World War One. As I say, World War One is history, it isn’t news. Forget it.” Harry Patch

“I keep the boys inside the house all the time. I can’t even let them go out into the backyard or to the rooftop. I’m doing my best to keep them away from this insanity, but how can I when it’s everywhere?! I wish I could cover their ears so they wouldn’t hear the sound of bombing. I feel like I’m dying, as I see the fear in their eyes.” Ghadeer, www.voicesofgaza.com

“It’s a situation, totally insane, you’re in it, it’s hard to explain. You’re looking through the binoculars and searching for someone to kill. That’s what you want to do. And you want to kill him. But do you want to kill him? But that’s your job.

“And you’re still looking through the binoculars and you’re starting to get confused. Do I want to? Don’t I want to? Maybe I actually want them to miss.” Avner Gvaryahu, Breaking the Silence

“All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?” Harry Patch

Notes from an adventure

There are very few moments in life when I can’t work out how to fill a spare patch of time. In fact if I’m worrying about it it’s usually a sign that I’m not well and probably need a very good night’s sleep. As I’ve said before, I am incredibly grateful for a childhood filled with adventure and curiosity which had meant I’m now the go to woman for such tasks as making play dough, refashioning a dress, finding a meal from scraps, or painting a picture.

But it wasn’t all “building life skills” as the jargon might have it, we also went on a lot of adventures. From my earliest age we’d go to see what the horses were doing, find out what was at the other end of the muddy lane, investigate the pathways of Heaton Park and get on a train to pretty much anywhere to see what we could find. And at the centre of it all was my mum.

Mum is hilarious. My cousins thought she was a witch with her buckled patent shoes. The local play group sang songs of political struggle. And she never misses the opportunity for a new adventure. And for me the best thing about the past two years has been that I always have a bed and access to those mini adventures because I’ve had my notional home at her house.

A few weeks ago I headed up on the train. We started with a choir concert at which mum, as ever, exuded joy. She had a different concert the following night but Sunday was our oyster. We went to Matlock Bath. And had an adventure. First we discovered a spirally staircase in the fish shop where we stopped for lemonade. Then we passed the Victorian petrifying chamber behind the arcade. Mum looked at me with her familiar twinkling eye. “I’ve never been in there…” So she paid our entrance fees, £2.40 each, and we started to explore. We found a cavern decorated like the bric a brac shelves of one of the less commercial style charity shops, rickety pipes spraying the heavily lime suffused water from the mountain spring over the wares. Many were caked in the grey-brown chalky deposits familiar to those in some places from the inside of kettles. This attraction had drawn people since Victorian times to see some slightly rocky jugs. It was pretty cool and any other visitors would have seen a pair of women speaking very quickly and laughing together as they spotted odd items or questioned whether, given how long stalactites take to form, there might have been some cheating by boiling some items in a kettle.

Next we wound our way through an aquarium, finding nemo, seeing the shy catfish, watching the tiger fish eye us suspiciously and some huge Amazonian fish ignore us completely. We stopped to watched turtles bullying each other, and some baby koi in a protective tank. A turn around the corner led us to Matlock Bath itself. In front of us was a Victorian swimming pool filled with the warm water from the petrifying stream. It was filled with enormous koi in many colours. There were shamelessly orange carp bobbing their noses out of the water whilst their willow pattern blue compatriots wandered in the depths. We weren’t going to but we did buy some food from the dispenser on the edge and fed the fish, a task we’ve done together since my earliest childhood. We looked at the architecture and tried to reconstruct the building. The we found photos to help us check our ideas. We imagined together life in one of the flats overlooking the pool and anthropomorphised the fishy conversations.

The next attraction were holograms. “I don’t know how they work but I know that if you break it you get two of the image repeated, not half and half” said Mum, everyday evidence of a life lived with curiosity. Some of the images were beautiful, some weird. Eerie clowns leered out at points, and cars sped past.

We left the baths through the games arcade and went for a wander by the river. A craft fair was open so we went in to have a little look. We stopped to talks to a man about honey and taste what he was selling. At some point in the future mum will tell someone the answer to the question as to why certain honey sets more quickly and they’ll wonder how she knows everything. We bought a bit of spicy cheese for tea, picking up her favourite lime pickle to match it.

Time was ticking on so we had a cup of tea. Obviously we went to the cafe at the top of the cable car to do so. Then we wandered back to the car, via another park to investigate the water features and casting knowing glances at each other when a campaigner was surprised that we knew the age if the NHS. We jumped in the car, headed back and had lunch. The day finished with a concert of summery music including the ethereal Furusato by Bob Chillcott, the second new-to-me music mum had sung for me over the weekend.

In so many ways the day was an ordinary Sunday, up a bit late, simple food, an evening drink in the local pub and ready for work the following day. But in the best ways it was something special. We went back in time, found out something new, took up tea with a bird’s eye view, shared a past and followed dreams we never knew that we had. It was, as every day can be in some way, a day of adventure.

Itinerant English

As well as the obvious reason for choosing my first degree (what’s a better way to spend three year’s when you’re 18 than reading books on the beach with a qualification at the end?), I have a deep love of the English language and the tales it can tell. There are many Englishes now, American English is the language of the world, British English the hub of historical literature, Singaporean English a way to be understood on the other side of the world. And Gambian English, known as Gamblish to the Peace Corps volunteers, was how I made myself understood for a year.

Gambian English is different; when Margaret visited Mardu asked what language we were speaking when trying to understand our Lancastrian chatter. Like our country’s constitution, English is free; our dictionary reacts to what people say rather than prescribe it through an institution. And, after learning the theory about how the language changes in different places, I had the opportunity to see those changes in action. Here are five of my favourites:

Light. Electricity, used when, in British English, we’d say power. A power cut translates as, there’s no light. A phrase I heard nearly every day.

How’s the morning? This is a rough translation from the Wolof greeting which means exactly what it asks though the answer is always “here” or “fine” regardless of how the morning is. A bit like “how’re you?” But more specific.

It’s normal. A comment made when you are doing something that would be expected. For example “I’m going to miss you”. “Of course, it’s normal”.

Long time. This means the same as “for ages”, as in “I’ve not seen you for ages”. However, in a culture where most people you care about live in your compound so you see then daily, a week between visits could easily qualify as “a long time”.

Compound. A gated complex. Or apartment block where all the houses are one/two room bungalows around some outdoor communal space because it’s warm enough to have the equivalent of a village green in every family.

And, my absolute favourite, Garden Egg. An aubergine, which I love because it’s been through American English to become egg plant and come back as a term of its very own.

Why I always rinse my recycling

In shared houses people have different ways of living. And in offices people’s standards differ too. Compromise and empathy, as well as not worrying too much, are the key to living happily in these shared environments of our lives. So there’s a cardigan on the back of my chair to match my need to feel warm with a colleague’s desire to have the air conditioning on. Abandoned cups and glasses get rinsed in my washing up bowl of hot water at home. Showers are timed in the morning and noisy meetings taken outside away from open plan concentrators.

There are different ways of living too. A housemate from a tropical country washes dishes under cool running water, I use a bowl of hot. In The Gambia spare food was thrown out for the chickens and ducks, here spare bread and cooked rice goes out for the wild birds and scraps onto the compost heap. I used to fall asleep with the acrid stench of smouldering piles of rotting plastic burning outside my window in that country with no real waste disposal system. Now waste is sorted and sent away to a pit or to be reused.

But, whilst not being a house or an office, that waste system is still a shared one. We have grown used to the virtue of being able to separate the materials which can be reused or remade and giving them to our shared system to make the best use of them. At least the first two stages of that system are not mechanical but they are powered by people.

When our recycling reaches the sorting centre it heads into a conveyor belt and people pick out the non-recyclable goods. Those people are helping everyone to keep our environment clean. Because of them we have a place to live where we rarely fall asleep to toxic plastic fumes, where our trees aren’t clogged by black plastic bags. To make them pick up mouldering coleslaw, or the sickening smell of slimy lettuce, or spatter themselves with a polka dot mix of botulism and tomato soup is impolite. They are doing a good job keeping our place nice for everyone. That is why I always rinse out my recycling.

I should have stood up

On Valentine’s Day I wrote about a breakfast. I was in Kuntaur, the town with the highest number of children per woman and terrible unemployment, poverty, disease, education and need. Once a thriving industrial hub and party town, Kuntaur now limps along for the few pennies raised from hippo spotting boat trips. The fences are rusted corrugate heaps loosely held together. The roads are rutted mud paths blown across with sand.

There are a few government buildings, the local area council and a department of agriculture complex. As usual the officers are male and the busiest part of any day is when “travel expenses” are handed out after meetings for people who probably came along in the prepaid luxury of a government or NGO pick up truck.

Kuntaur, like the rest of The Gambia also has very high rates of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). FGM has been in the news here in the UK, with pledges against it from the government urged on by female members of the cabinet taking an issue of violent child, gender and sexual abuse seriously and right to the top of the political agenda for a few moments. As seems to happen regularly, from immigration cases to stories raised in parliament, the Girl summit included another tale with a Gambian link. This time it was Jaha Dukureh, an activist in America originally from The Gambia. Despite this growing prominence of Gambian women fighting on the international stage and locally The Gambia still has no effective laws against FGM. Some claim it would drive the practice underground, but then good policing is the answer, just like when Gambia became a base for policing the abolition of the African slave trade.

But I went to Kuntaur as a tourist. I wanted to see a hippopotamus. Whilst I went overseas to work and to see how systems operate and to help develop projects, spotting a hippo in the wild was one of the three “gap year traveller” style things I really, really wanted to do in The Gambia. I travelled with another VSO volunteer and his girl friend. She had worked at the Kuntaur agriculture office before and booked us rooms overnight. The staff were delighted, more do when they learned I could speak some of the local language. We played with the children. We were treated to an amazing breakfast. During which a man came in and shared tea with us.

He’d been the driver taking the local girls to be circumcised by the river. I went quiet, my instinct to shout, my training and the habitual gender norms of being a woman commanding me to be “polite” to my hosts and understanding of another culture, my language too weak to have the argument. My training was wrong. I knew what he had done and what they were talking about. I should have stood up and refused to break bread with someone who breaks children and women. Like Jaha I should have stood up.

Positives

There is a Facebook meme asking for people to remark upon the positive elements of their day. It’s a good idea, one I’ve used before when trying to combat distress in some form or other. So when I was asked to join in the latest trend my blurted out response was “sure, I think I’ll find that easy”. So, as a challenge, here’s a list of 25 positive things from today.

1. Realising I now find being positive “easy” after many years of struggle.
2. An impromptu chat with work colleagues to admire the gift of a bike basket.
3. The bike basket fitting onto my bike.
4. Extra strong coffee made at work and being very tasty despite being accidental.
5. The thought of a colleague to invite me to a meeting which is relevant.
6. The gift of a chocolate bar for me in the kitchen at the very moment in project planning when chocolate was needed.
7. Warm sunlight through the window overcoming the chill of sitting under the air conditioning.
8. Finding a dinner time that saves an extra £7 each week but also means I’m eating properly.
9. The sudden metaphysical moment of realising how normal and pleasant it feels to work in my current office.
10. A message from a friend offering to visit.
11. A message from my uncle making me smile.
12. An emailed thank you for a passing conversation yesterday.
13. A joke from the marketing guy when I added another activity to his overflowing list.
14. An unexpected and productive chat over the friendship boards.
15. Knowing the brook side route home.
16. The sun shining.
17. Hearing that my mum liked my previous blog.
18. Gathering a handful of blackberries for pudding freely from my garden.
19. Having power in the house without having to think about it.
20. Being able to witness the stories coming out of Gaza and seeing the outrage building on social media.
21. A sudden revelation on how to make my latest painting better.
22. The latest flower on my housewarming orchid opening up.
23. A few moments to listen to radio four.
24. A few moments to listen to nothing but my soul.
25. The hope of a good night’s sleep ahead.

A bike ride

The office day drew to a close. I took off the cardigan I wear to combat the air conditioning, put on the jeans I wear to combat ripping my clothes on my gear cogs, and left the office. Despite yesterday’s storm, the fresh feel to the air had dissipated and I was hit by a dry gust of hot air as I left the foyer. The sunlight stung my eyes. I was feeling crotchety and irritable. So, because my gran always tells me to be kind to myself, I went on a bike ride.

There’s a nearby brook that babbles a winding route and nearly connects home to work. However the path involves a cut through a ginnel. For a few nights I’ve sought that ginnel out in a wandering way, inevitably looping around and back to the start of my detour without a glimpse of the brook. Today I cheated. I consulted the internet. Five minutes after strapping on my helmet I was under the railway bridge and on my way to the path to the romantic ideals of summer like a dog in a detective cartoon.

An old Nepalese couple stood on the concrete bridge over the brook, watching the currents eddying over the rooks below. As I passed behind them the sound changed, a consistent rough scratching as my tyres ran smoothly across the municipal gravel pathway. The sour tang of stinging nettles filled the air, each breath demanding that the tension in my soul release itself to make room for summer.

The route is full of meandering curves, perfect for cycling and inducing an unconscious lingering pace. Alone in the solitude of a perfect summer’s evening I rode up to the wooden bridge that gently bows over the brook. At my sauntering speed I could see bubbles bursting calmly on the brown water and the violent green fronds of weeds mellowed by their gentle wafting through the umber brook. A slight hiatus then the momentum of the downward sweep of the bridge pushed me onwards.

Through the shaded loops of gravelly path, passing forks leading to routes as yet unexplored, I cycled on, heart lightened and once again curious about the world. I was surprised to come across the local park seemingly too soon so cycled past. A large group of older people sat in the evening sun as behind them two boys stood in the stream on stepping stone rocks, casting stones into the water as if casting themselves into a 1950’s reading book.

A squirrel bobbed past, intent on some cheerful business, and I came across wild raspberries and blackberries. I stopped for refreshment, the bittersweet bubbles of blackberries bursting, challenging the eater to a game of tart or treat roulette.

Back through another ginnel and home, irritation of the day rinsed away so I can return to problem solving. As I swept cleanly into my street I passed a neighbour. “I should get my bike out”, he said.

I replied, “Yes, it’s lovely. It does make the trip home a lot longer though”.

A trip to the shops down memory lane

Having decided on Wednesday to have a bacon butty for Saturday lunch I took care during my Friday lunch break trip to buy lunch to pick up some bacon. I’ve now become used popping to the huge sainsburys near my office, used to choosing what I fancy for lunch. At first when I came back such a trip would’ve troubled me and I spent several weeks restricting my level of choice to soup rather than the pick and mix variety we have become used to in the UK.

However my shopping trip was inadequate and today dawned with the realisation that I finished the bread from my freezer two weeks ago. So, as on so many Gambian mornings, l popped on my African skirt and a vest and wandered to the corner shop. As I entered the shutters were down on some windows, a half open look supporting the visual look expected for the local reputation of the area. Inside was a tight rabbit warren of shelves packed with jumbled coloured tins and bright biscuit packets.

At first I panicked a little wondering where the bread might be, until I found it round a corner, prices on yellow rectangular stickers on the shelf below. After juggling the whole meal/white choice I double checked the coins I had and picked up a can on pop for a sunny day treat too. I turned around and suddenly remembered that I lived for a year from just this kind of shop. I spotted canned mushrooms, a special import in The Gambia that I only bought once for my New Year’s party. I’d had to walk to the big shop for them. That’s essentially where I was, the expat supermarket at traffic light corner. The same shop smart in The Gambia and yet here in a poor corner of the affluent south east boarded up and an emergency resource for a poorly prepared promised bacon butty. The pop was even the same price, no difference reflecting local average income.

I walked home drinking my pop, no longer saving it until I could wash the lid/use a glass to avoid the risk of Weill’s disease I would have worried about six months ago. Once again the pavements, stubbly grass verges and clean toes came into focus, not as a treat just as something different.

Hey lady, you walk like a champion.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been walking around in a reasonably relaxed mood. I’m getting used to jumping on a train into London. I’m no longer surprised by pavements. I have an umbrella and sunglasses in my bag and pack lighter clothes and a scarf for the weekend in case of sudden changes in the weather. Wandering around, working out my way, solving problems on my own has become normal once again.

Then today I suddenly realised I haven’t been asked out for three months. That is not in itself remarkable; it’s simply not British culture to ask our every woman you see alone. But it was a regular occurrence in The Gambia. And by regular I mean daily if not hourly.

Among my fellow volunteers I developed a bit of a reputation for being queen of the brush off. As I do in the UK I refuse to be chatted up by a racist. So, as happened weekly, when someone begged to talk to me because he wanted a “white wife” I’d ask if he thought white women were better than black. If he said yes I’d calmly tell him that his view is racist and ask him to leave my company as I don’t speak to racists. This generally resulted in a bit of resistance but usually worked eventually. It didn’t help that we lived in an area known globally for sex tourism.

The streets in The Gambia are a male domain. There are women around, especially in the tourist areas, but generally they would be working rather than strolling. The constant catcalls could become very annoying, the “need” to be walked home because I lived in a no-go area meant I always made sure I had at least a taxi fare left, and made friends in choir. Long beach walks in solitude or with a friend were impossible. And the constant threat of attack or harassment became a background hum to my movements.

There were however highlights. Occasionally a passing guy would forget to shout a comment, then add a quick “hi boss lady, can I talk to you?” in a distracted, almost irritable way as if harassing me was a considerable inconvenience but had to be done. They usually made me laugh. And just sometimes it felt nice to share the humanity of the streets. Once the passing “I love you” shouted from a van as I walked in the rain did fit my mood. And the delight of finding out how or why I spoke Wolof made me complicit with taxi drivers when other passengers started bad mouthing me or got an essential watermelon discount.

Overall it’s good to talk. But nice to be seen once again as just a normal person with an unremarkable but equal right to stand on a train platform considering the change of the weather.

Family of One

I’m sure my friends see me as queen of the transition stage, and are slightly baffled by my long-term single life. It’s an art to be learned this way I live. I grew up in a huge family, and have spent the past year enjoying the company of happy families, who wouldn’t? But mid-thirties is the family building age. And my family currently doesn’t look like it’ll be a big one. But whatever happens I know that the family I’m building has at least me in it. So here are my top five tips for a well functioning family of one.

1. Know the difference between the pain of loneliness and the joy of solitude
In the big families I know there’s a secret space. A calm and ordered laundry room, a lockable bathroom, a garage workbench. As a family of one enjoy the times when you have what others long for. There’s a joy to deciding on a whim, to only hearing environmental noises, to staring at a stream until you and no one else has has enough. And yes, there is a pain to not having a best friend on your side, to having to be brave and discover the world by yourself. But there is joy. And that joy can be cultivated and cherished.

2. Live the life you love
It’s easy not to go to a new restaurant, not to eat oysters watching the sun set over the sea, not to keep cycling until you’ve lost count of the turns you’ve taken, not to wear a fabulous outfit. But sitting in your room watching old TV isn’t always what you love. Courage to sit in a restaurant on your own. Courage to walk out of the front door. Courage to get lost and right yourself on a new route. And with courage you will have a life in which you do what you love, rather than waiting for someone else giving you permission to do it.

3. Understand how to cheer yourself up…
There are times in everyone’s life when you need a cuddle, laughter or a pep talk. An interview is looming or didn’t go so well, a project failed, there’s been too much change in accommodation, you fell off your bike or spilled bright green seaweed on your white linen trousers. And, sometimes, no one is there. Except yourself. It is vital that you know how to cheer yourself up. An orchid housewarming present marked a moment when homelessness paused, loud singing and long bike ride in the sun on a disappointing Sunday. And smiling. Because I didn’t fall off.

4. …and how to stand up for yourself
However much I like to walk away from anger there are times when it seems like no one is on your side. People around you want to tell you what you think or “the right” way (i.e. one where you inconvenience yourself for them). I’m pretty sure that this happens more often in my family set up, not being in a nuclear semi detached is seen as a sign that I probably can’t handle any side of life, from shopping effectively to ironing correctly. In a family people stand up for each other, and you develop a shared culture. So in a family of one you must too, stating your ground firmly and preferably calmly in conflict, and setting standards for yourself.

5. Appreciate small kindnesses
There are a thousand things a family of one can do that are trickier with a larger family. We can up sticks and move continents, or visit friends without creating conflicting routines, or travel the country on a whim. But I have found it would be nothing without the network of kindness I have; friends who’ll give me a home, a lift to a station, share a bottle of wine or a meal, listen to the stories of my life. Family who’ll know my mood and protect me when I’m on an edge or push me when free falling over it will be much better for me.

These are things I need, I need companionship, I need to narrate my life to willing listeners, I need to learn about the lives other people lead. These are the small kindnesses are the things a larger family would do for each other, the bones that support the body. In a family of one you are a crustacean, my bones are exoskeletal; a vast network of people spanning every element of my life and sharing tales together.