Books for uncertain times?

The question has been raised with me in more than one place. Do we need something new and different or do we need something comforting? Do we want an exciting novel by a favourite author or do we want to reread something from the past? It would be interesting to discover what people are borrowing from the library right now. I suspect most of us go back to something we have read before.

Amanda Craig suggested "Lord of the Rings" for her comfort read on Twitter but I wondered what my childhood self might have read. My thoughts turned first to "When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit" by Judith Kerr.  It's a partly autobiographical book and all the more powerful because of it. That sentence at the end of the first chapter! "Papa had gone." From then on the reader is caught up in all the uncertainties and anxieties of being a refugee. Would I have wanted to reread that? I don't know. It is an unsettling book.

In my thoughts moved on to "The Ark" by Margot Benary. There is Mother, who has lost one child to the war, trying to hold the family together while not knowing where their father is - or even if he is still alive. They are not really welcome in the house to which they have been assigned. There is still severe rationing - they need to divide the potatoes up so that they last right through the allotted time. They are always hungry and not just for food but for knowledge. Yes, the book ends well enough. Father returns but the happiness is tempered by the child who has been lost and the manner in which Father learns of it. Would I have wanted to reread that?

And then Michelle Magorian's "Goodnight Mr Tom"? No I could not have reread that. It is much too painful. The relationship between the abused child and the disagreeable old man is a wonderful exploration of learning to trust one another but the events are harrowing. Yes, it is a very good book but it is also very emotionally confronting.

There is "Carrie's War" by Nina Bawden. I may have been able to reread that because it does have some lighter moments. I once had the privilege of meeting the author and, later, hearing her talk about it.  The book was based on her own experiences and that surely has to be one reason why the book sounds so authentic. Carrie and Nick are the sort of characters you feel you might meet in the street. You get more than a glimpse of life in the Welsh valleys too.

Jill Paton Walsh was criticised for writing both "The Dolphin Crossing" and "Fireweed".  In my short time working as a school librarian The Dolphin Crossing was considered to be highly controversial. Parental permission had to be sought to read it. I wonder what children would make of it now. I don't think C... ever read it although it was there on the shelves. I remember Nina Bawden saying that Jill Paton Walsh didn't have the necessary experience to write the book...and perhaps she was right. It hasn't lasted the way Carrie's War has lasted.

"Visitors from London" by Kitty Barne was published early in WWII. It deals with the early evacuations from London - before the war had really begun. It won the Carnegie Medal but it would be considered "old fashioned" by a child now, indeed would have been for a very long time. I thought it was a bit like that when I first read it although I think I liked it well enough. Recently I had cause to look at it again when reading an essay by a student and the thing that struck me most is something I am sure I missed as a child. It is the issue of  domestic violence - the way in which the mother of the evacuee family does not want to return to London and the abusive relationship. Perhaps we need to give more attention to the book?

Ann Holm's "I am David" has one of the best conclusions to a children's book ever. The simple, "Madam, I am David" is all that is needed. We are left to hope that, after his journey across Europe, David has actually found his mother.  We also know that, even if he has, it is not going to be easy for either of them. He has grown a great deal during the journey but he will never really be free of his time in the labour camp.  There is just a little bit of hope there but would I want to read it?

I know there will be other books, good books, I have missed but there is one last book I must mention. It is "The Silver Sword" by Ian Serraillier, a book still in print and still being read in schools - and rightly so. It is an adventure story, a growing up story, a facing adversity story. Jan is always going to be a prickly individual. The ending isn't all sweetness and light either. Ruth, so strong for so long, finally needs the support she has been giving the others - we are confronted with the mental health realities of surviving such a war. 

I think I would look for comfort elsewhere - fantasy or funny or both.

 

International Women's Day in a time

of war - war in more than one place and on more than one front.

I was opening the front curtain this morning just at the time that the paediatrician across the street was getting her two boys into the car to drop them at school.   Like all children they had obviously forgotten things. H... , the younger of the two, rushed back inside and came out clutching a large piece of paper. His mother hurried him into the car, checked his safety belt was properly fastened and they were off. 

There would have been similar scenes over thousands of households all over the city this morning. It is considered "normal".

I suppose I considered the same sort of thing "normal" when I was a mere kitten too. For most of my school life my mother was a full time teacher and then school principal. She worked hard. My brother and I saw very little of her. My sisters were taught by her - but Middle Cat remembers her as "not being like Mum in the classroom". 

I have been thinking of all this in the past week or so as I have watched footage of yet more mothers trying to get their children out of yet another war zone. I have watched women trying to get children who are not their own out too.

Women do extraordinary things during wars. It is something we all too often fail to acknowledge. They will go without food, without sleep, without protection for themselves in order to save children. They will pass their own children to complete strangers in the hope this will keep them safe from the greater harm of staying where they are. It is something I would like to think I understood but I know, not having children of my own, I don't understand. I know I would take care of any child passed to me. I would do it to the best of my ability but I could never be "mother". 

When I hear stories of mothers harming their children I wonder what has gone so wrong that they would do this. It isn't "normal". I think "normal" is the nurturing instinct - the one which is concerned with the very survival of the human race.  Men will never understand that in the same way. They don't carry the future inside themselves. 

To all the mothers out there doing the best you can to care for your children - I salute you.

No, I didn't watch the Gay and Lesbian

Mardi Gras. I watch almost no television. 

I watch about half an hour of television a day - a news service which concentrates more on international than local news. The only reason I watch it is so that I have an idea of what people who watch television are being told.  I read newspapers which have a "good" reputation - although I tend to treat those with caution as well. I also get news from a range of other sources - some of which I trust, others of which I am wary. I hope I am reasonably well informed.

Very occasionally I will watch a documentary if the subject catches my interest.

What I don't need to watch is a "celebration" of gay and lesbian "culture" - a so called "Mardi Gras". It just doesn't appeal to me at all. Why? Because it is not the way my friends in same-sex relationships behave at all. 

My cousin is in a same sex relationship. When it became legal to do so in the UK he married the man he has been with for the past forty years. His partner is one of the nicest, kindest people I know and, as a family, we were united in feeling pleased for them. But they didn't make a fuss. It was a small, quiet ceremony.  

They don't walk down the street holding hands. They don't feel any need to do that. 

My friends R...and G... are the same. They married overseas before it became legal here because they wanted to show their commitment to one another but they did it without a fuss. Like my cousin and his partner they don't walk down the street holding hands. 

Neither couple feels the need to flaunt their sexuality. I know other gay men, perhaps a dozen or more. Yes, you might know they are gay but they don't feel any need to flaunt it. They actually lead fairly quiet and conservative lives...even the three I know in very artistic occupations. 

It is much the same with the lesbian women I know. There are a number of them in long term relationships with other women. They don't flaunt the fact. They just get on with life as they have been getting on with life for many years. 

The Mardi Gras televised by our national network is of no interest to the people I know. They did not watch what was billed as a "celebration of GLTBQIA culture". 

"It's rubbish," R... once told me after someone we both knew had asked him about it. R... and his partner were going to be in the same city the weekend it was held. They were going to the theatre that night. I remember when they got back asking whether they had enjoyed the play they saw and the response was, "That alone would have been worth the trip."

But go to the Mardi Gras? No, they don't need to. They have never felt the need. It makes me wonder why other people do feel the need to go, to participate. Do they still feel insecure? Are they uncertain? Why do they feel they are discriminated against?

The first march all those years ago was a protest against what was real discrimination. "Now most of that is more imagined than real," R... tells me.  I have to accept he knows. He has lived through it. 

And I feel no need to watch anything like that on television. It's not my world.  

They never had a chance to play cricket

Cricket is one of this sports mad country's games of national importance I suppose. Cricket is played at all levels right up to and including international. 

In the past few days two cricketers who were well known to anyone who listens to the cricket news have died - Rod Marsh and Shane Warne. There has also been a media fuss about their deaths. In this morning's paper there are no less than twenty-four pages devoted to Shane Warne and his life. There has been the offer of a state funeral for him. I didn't read the pages. I am not a cricket tragic - "tragic" being Downunder slang for "obsessive".

Marsh was older than I am - although not by that much. It was still perhaps too soon given that I know many people who are much older. Warne was younger, much younger. I feel for his three children. It is going to be really tough for them.  Your name? Oh you're Shane Warne's kid?  I know what that is like. As a kitten I was my grandfather's granddaughter and my father's daughter. I still get it occasionally. Will Warne's children feel compelled to be cricket tragics?

But all that pales into insignificance when I think of something else. I watched a clip of a father weeping over the body of his child - killed in a war that he had no say in at all. His father had no say either. His mother? We didn't find out where she was but if there were other children she had probably tried to take them to safety. Possibly she is the mother whose back view we see in one of those many photographs - crossing the road to the railway station with a young child on her right and a gun on her left shoulder.

I often think of the children in conflict zones. For too many years my work has involved working with people who are working with what we call "unaccompanied" children - children who have no adult taking responsibility for them. Some of these children who are often so traumatised they have simply stopped speaking. They won't make eye contact. They won't respond to questions. If you try to make physical contact they will break away. They will sit for hours fiddling with a pebble or a few grains of sand or the edge of a piece of clothing. They no longer know how to play.

It can take years and more patience than we want to acknowledge to get these children back to some semblance of what we consider to be "normal".  They don't play cricket.

It is easier to focus on the death of a cricketer most of us have never met than the horrors unfolding in other parts of the world. As Eliot puts it, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."

 

"Look at (the Russian's) hands"

I tell him.

Waiting around for the results of the compulsory "RAT" (rapid antigen test) is part of life.  I accept having to do them in order to visit the Senior Cat and other older people in various residences. It's an irritating but essential part of life at present. 

What is not essential is being lectured by a complete stranger - also waiting for the results of the test - about how our "biased" news media is not giving any "support for the Russian side". He wanted "more support for the Russian side". They were "not the aggressors". No, he didn't much like the President but "he's not nearly as bad as people make out".

I had actually not said anything to this man. He was one of those people in whose presence I did not feel comfortable. I am sure you know the sort of thing I mean. There was just that "something" about him. We had nodded to one another and to the other person present. I had helped the other person do her test. We have met before. 

She is a  quiet woman whose husband has dementia. She comes to see him each day. Sometimes he knows her and sometimes he doesn't.  It is very difficult for her. We usually just smile and exchange a few words but yesterday she moved closer to me as the tirade continued.

Strictly you should wait twelve minutes minimum and fifteen maximum for the results of this RAT. Each minute felt like an hour as he ranted on. The staff member who had come to help him (I can do my own and so can the other woman) escaped telling me, "If he's clear to come in tell C.... will you?"

He didn't like that either. Too bad. He reverted to ranting on. I sent the quiet woman in to the safety of the building. Then I turned to him and I said, "Just leave it will you? Next time you are watching the news you think is so biased remember that the reporters are in there risking their lives to get the news, any news, out to you." No, he didn't like that. I knew he wouldn't. He started again but I overrode him saying, "And when the camera is trained on Russia's representative at the UN watch his hands. He is constantly fiddling. He's nervous. He is trying to defend the indefensible and he knows the world is watching. Your RAT test is negative but you are a rat if you believe that Russia's actions can be "totally justified" - your words, not mine." 

Watch their representative (Vasily Nebenzya). He avoids looking at the camera and, more than once, I have seen him playing with what looks like a (computer) mouse when he speaks. Perhaps I am wrong but he doesn't look comfortable.   

Trauma brings about very different

reactions in different people. 

Yesterday someone I know asked me, "Cat, could you just go and check on Mum? The neighbours are out and she isn't answering the phone." 

I went. I went without hesitation because his mother is in her late eighties. His mother is also Ukrainian by birth. 

Her son, with whom she lives, had to go to work. Either he calls her at lunch time or one of the neighbours will check. They know where to find the key if they need to go in. I know where to find the key.

But the back door was open. I could see V... She was just sitting at the kitchen table...and I mean "just sitting". She was staring at something I couldn't see. It was a long way from where she was sitting.

She looked at me after a moment and I said as gently as I could, "A... was worried. You didn't answer the phone."

"I was afraid," she told me. I gave her a hug and she held on for a long moment. I could feel her shaking.

I took their phone and rang her son. "She was a bit anxious about answering the phone," I told him. I passed the phone to her. She spoke to him hesitantly in Ukrainian - a language he doesn't really understand. He was born here. 

Then she passed the phone back to me. A... and I agreed that the situation in what she still considers to be her "home" country is something she is finding very traumatic. He will now organise for more neighbours further down the street to also be available for the present while. They have already offered but today he wanted someone who knew where to find the key if necessary.

I finished the conversation with A...  His mother was up and moving around the kitchen making us both a cold drink. We sat at the kitchen table and I talked to her about A... and how hard he is working right now and about her garden. 

When I left about twenty minutes later she was getting ready to deal with some seedlings she had "rescued" from the garden centre. The seedlings will probably grow for her. 

I muttered a word of thanks to the sunflowers along her fence as I pedalled off.  

A beauty salon called "Killer Russians"

has been unwittingly caught up in the war between the Ukraine and Russia.

The salon itself is located in the city in which I live. The owner apparently named it after some sort of "eyelash extensions" of a Russian variety and "killer" was apparently some sort of slang for "good".  

All that sounds very odd to me but it is obviously what the owner thought was a good idea at the time. Now she is the target of people who simply aren't thinking. The volume of business has dropped dramatically. She employs two Ukrainians but is being told she is "siding with the Russians". There have been death threats and more. 

The owner is going to change the name and more. It will cost her about $10,000 to do this according to the newspaper report. I wonder if she can do it without going out of business. Any business like that is still struggling to recover from the pandemic restrictions - indeed, we still have some restrictions. Of course there is a small possibility that the present publicity will cause an upturn in her business... although the location doesn't suggest that is likely.

I think/hope that had I passed the shop recently I would simply have thought, "That's an unfortunate name right now". I certainly would not have vandalised the place, uttered death threats or made vile comments on social media. 

It is too easy to make assumptions. It is too easy not to do the necessary research. It is too easy not to think at all. 

In the case of the shop name the consequences are unfortunate but they are likely to be limited.  That is not always the case. Over the past week there has been a political "story" here that has been repeated many times. It is not correct but even the main media outlets have repeated it. Undoubtedly they first did it because nobody bothered to find out if it was correct. When the error was pointed out some of them repeated it anyway - because it suited them to do it. They did not want to be caught in the wrong. The incorrect version suits their agenda.

In some, perhaps many, ways the vast flow of "information" we can now access is leaving us less well informed. "Opinion" has all too often become more important than facts.

I need facts.