The song I know of Africa (who doesn’t know one of me)

Posted on June 11, 2013 by memoirsofahusk

Sierra Exif JPEGIs that a humming sound?

Hum becomes buzz. An insect passes by, unhurried. Buzz fades into hum again – and the insect vanishes.

A bird on creaking wings utters a plaintive call as it crosses the glinting river and heads for the horizon.

Leaves rustle, clutched in the trunk of a feeding elephant, arriving, unheard, on tiptoe.

His tummy will gurgle in a minute. The fruits are good, this time of year.

A muffled cough betrays the presence of a lion, somewhere, sheltering from the tropical sun in the shade of a scrubby tree.

No traffic, no shouting.

No hustle, no bustle.

No jet trails in the sky.

To foreign ears it’s quiet, but this humming, rustling, coughing, creaking, plaintively calling continent sings its perennial song, whether they hear it or not.

There is no silence.

A long, lazy river winds its stately way through a broad valley bordered by distant escarpments.

It’s the dry season. Sandy banks stretch for miles where once a formidable torrent crashed towards the Zambezi.

Today the air has a smell that’s dry. A rusty, dusty, tired smell, as the day declines. But here in the southern hemisphere, despite the heat, it’s winter and another scent curls its way over everything.

The scent of Africa.

The scent that greets me as I step, weary from the ten-hour flight, onto the old grey tarmac of the airport.

The scent that slips through the vents with the seeping orange dust as we drive the Great East Road.

The scent that whisks me back here on an instant when I open my conker-brown polished wood pot. It was meant as a present, but I kept it. Africa is in there, if I need her.

And so to late afternoon. The shutter drops on daylight and evening steals the night.

Above us, only sky. But no, not only sky. The stars. Oh, my, the stars.

Shooting to earth, racing to extinction. Glorious for one pinprick in the endless fabric of time.

I’m easing myself back in, gradually.

Therapy by word-stealth.

All too soon will come the vaccinations and visas, insurance and boarding passes, the petty annoyances of travel that will make me forget why I’m going.

But I’m going.

And so I ask, does Africa, immense, unfathomable Africa, know a song of me?

I’ve never had a farm in Africa, at the foot of any hills.

I’ve never seen the sweat on the faces of coffee pickers and I don’t see ploughs, not where I go.

But I’ve seen the tall giraffe.

I’ve seen the new moon, lying on her back.

I’ve seen the air quiver, but not with a colour that I have had on.

No children, to the best of my knowledge, have invented a game in which my name appears and my shadow will not be cast on any gravel drive when the moon is full.

I have seen the giant eagle owl, in the valley of the Luangwa, but it won’t be looking out for me.

No, if she doesn’t know a song of Karen Blixen, Africa surely doesn’t know one of me.

“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air quiver over the plain with a colour that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”

Karen Blixen writing under the pen name Isak Dinesen.

[My apologies if this infringes any copyright, I don’t think it does.]

Posted in If you only read one ..., Zambia | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

A new BBC radio programme, please, to cheer up the world

Posted on June 7, 2013 by memoirsofahusk

I’m sitting in a classroom, in a temporary building on a patch of waste ground. The ‘hut’, as we call it, looks as if it’s been dropped here by a tornado, like Dorothy’s farm in the Wizard of Oz.

We’re surrounded by Victorian terraced houses of soot-blackened stone and a couple of streets away, at the top of a steep hill, is a mill with the hugest mill chimney I’ve ever seen. Square, with ornate embellishments. A signal to the world that Lister’s wool is best.

People round here say you could drive a coach and horses round the chimney top – but why would anyone want to? It is a chimney, after all. And how would you get the horses up there, let alone the coach?

For a brief, idyllic period I’m living in the shadow of the mill, skipping distance from Bradford’s Lister Park – yes, the same Lister,  a classic Victorian philanthropist.

There I develop a lifelong fascination for stones, thanks to Cartwright Hall, which houses a collection of excellent fossils.

There I graze my knees, my elbows, my nose, rolling down the little hills in my shiny metal and red-leather roller skates with the black rubber stopping thing on the toes that usually tips me over. I don’t think you’re meant to use it on slopes.

I can walk to school, past the mill and the floating wool wisps that I make into fairies in my head. Odd smelling fairies, but who knows how fairies really smell? (With their noses, before you say it.)

But back to school.

My school’s a poor school in a poor area. The main Victorian building, two streets away from the hut, where we eat our school dinners, is condemned. But it’s a good school, so it’s incredibly popular. And there’s no limit on class size.

In our class of 48, children like me – a headmaster’s daughter whose mum drives a car and whose house has central heating – sit alongside children whose houses have no indoor lavatory, let alone heating, and have never even been in a car.

Plus, they eat the whole apple. The whole apple! Except for the pips, obviously. Because as we all know they’d grow into trees in our tummies and we’d DIE!

I’m in Mrs Wilkinson’s class. One day a week she limps out (her leg, deformed in World War II in some unspecified accident, is a sight that I find unutterably fascinating) – carrying a large radio from the store cupboard.  The prefect hands out booklets and Miss switches on.

It’s time for ‘Singing Together’, a programme on the BBC schools’ service.

The shabby classroom vanishes. (I wish the same could be said of the earwigs nesting in my desk. The big tin of talcum powder Mrs W keeps handy may sort them out for a while, but I know they’ll be back.)

Out of the windows, across the waste ground, up and over the great big chimney, across the moors to the sea, we’ve sailed across the world. One minute we’re in Jamaica, sipping fiery rum (shocking, at our age), then we’re leaving Kingston town, bound for South Australia and wondering at the laughing Kookaburra.

And on we sing, day after day – in assembly, in music lessons, at Mass, in playground games of big ships sailing through the alley-alley-oh and gathering nuts in May.

By the time I leave school and the communal singing has stopped – apart from Sunday Mass (which doesn’t count as I am embarrassed and mostly just mouth the hymns) – I’ve learned to drive. My mum lends me the car and I tootle over to Ilkley Moor, singing along to the radio. Oh joy! No one to hear, at last I can sing to my heart’s content.

I mostly listen to BBC Radio 4 now. Talking. Listening. It’s not the same.

Once you’re grown up (questionable, in my case) then if you’re not fine of voice (I’m not) the chances are you only sing at concerts of the not-too-heavy-rock variety. Or at rugby or footie matches. Or maybe, a little tiddly, to 60s, 70s, 80s – even 90s – nostalgia on late night TV.

But for the last few months I’ve been singing in company once more. An unforeseen side effect (one of many) of the great religious experiment.* Singing at church. Yes, I’ve found my voice! Even Atheist man is hooked – for now.

Because it feels good, singing together.

So, pending the end of the religious experience, just in case, I’d like the BBC to come up with a new radio programme:

‘Singing together alone.’

We could download the words and sing on our own, or in company. It’d be on at a certain time and not available as listen-again. So that even if we sang alone we’d know, we’re really singing together.

Cue the Beatles.

All, together, now (all together now).

*If you’ve not seen any of my posts on this subject, Atheist-man decided last Advent he wanted to attend church for a year,  for the experience, as an anthropologist (and a human being). If you’d like to read all about it, all the posts so far are together under the ‘Religious for a year’ page – you’ll find a tab at the top.

Posted in Religious for a year: Atheist-man's experiment, Thinking, or ranting, or both | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Strutting cocks and thrusting spears . . .

Posted on June 6, 2013 by memoirsofahusk

Sierra Exif JPEGA cock’s a-doodle-dooing, tail-feathers waving as he struts his stuff.

‘Look at me!’ he signals, to the world of hens.

Chubby grey guinea fowl scurry around as one, moving hither and thither, to no apparent purpose. Like a cloud blown by a changeable wind.

You can almost hear a heat haze. You know that sound, don’t you? Nothing – but something.

I tear myself away from the tall trees, rustling a subtle rustle in the stillness. ‘Shouldn’t there be a breeze?’ they’re saying. Used to the storms and downpours of this long, dreary winter they’re moving, despite themselves.

But best get on. I’m here to make a purchase.

Not a guinea fowl. Not a chicken. Not an egg.

Sparrow grass, that’s what I’m after.  Tasty, fat, thin, sandy sparrow grass. Luscious spears of green, thrusting through the sandy soil. Cut off in their prime, before they have a chance to turn into the delicate ferny fronds that nature intended.

Special asparagus cutting tool

Special asparagus cutting tool

Roger, tall – and weather-beaten from harvesting – chats to a man who’s leaning on a ‘real’ Land Rover. The kind that should have a nervous sheepdog in the back, desperate to herd us. Or a Jack Russell in the front, surveying the world from her two-pawed dashboard perch or sniffing nosily at strangers through the open window.

‘I like your Land Rover,’  I say. Can’t help it. Always one for the blindingly obvious, me.

‘Aye. She’s for working. I need her, not like these forbifors. She has to go off road in all weathers. And not for fun.’

Turns out he’s a gamekeeper. Looking for a crown. Of asparagus.

For fun.

‘I’m not interested in farming it. I’ll come here and buy it, even if mine grows. Best in the country, this is.’

By the time we leave he’s promised us pheasant, partridge and – if we’re very, very lucky – grouse. In season, of course. And possibly plucked.

Phew. A vivid memory, that. Anthro-man, newly a PhD, desperate to earn a crust, tries turkey plucking. Two days of misery, feathers and blood and he’s never eaten turkey again. (And he didn’t get paid.)

‘They’re the best, grouse,’ says the keeper of game, having spared us the trauma of future plucking. ‘But hard to come by, here. Yorkshire’s the place. And it all depends on the weather. The flies.’

A cold week ahead will spell doom for the flies.

Doomed flies means starving chicks.

You can guess the rest. That’s nature.

I make a silent request of the weather god. Keep calm, please, for a little while, for the flies’ sake. No tantrums with your rain, or wind, or snow. We deserve it, you know.

And so we let him go, Mr Gamekeeper, in his beautiful Landy.

I buy some sprue and super-fat stems.

Roger demonstrates cutting

Roger demonstrates cutting

‘How long’ve we got, this year?’ I ask Roger.

‘June 21st.’

‘Same as last year?’

Nod. He’s sparing with words.

So, despite the late start (your fault, weather god – you listening?) the season ends the same time.

Tough business, asparagus farming.

Tough business gamekeeping.

Why are we drawn to these things? Because they’re real? Because they’re such a relief after the keyboards, screens and traffic, the washing lines and chimneypots?

Minutes later we’re back on the road in L. The postcode for Liverpool.

Who’d a thought it?

What a wonderful world it is, on a sunny day, on the asparagus farm, in Formby. Near Liverpool.

Posted in Art, jaunts & going out, Liverpool | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Up she rises, earl-eye in the morning. One Sunday in May.

Posted on June 1, 2013 by memoirsofahusk

Amazing what the sun brings out, my parents would say. Like spots. Though it’s possible they actually said pimples.

Does anyone say pimples any more?

Religion is like a moral sun for me. It brings out my worst fears, agonies, shame, embarrassment – and guilt. I try and squash it most of the time but when you’re there, in church, beating your breast, accepting it’s not just your fault but your most grievous fault – well, it’s only natural, isn’t it?

Sunday dawns fair. Very fair. Warm too. It’s most peculiar. We’ve become so accustomed to this endless dour, miserable, mean, sneaky winter that we’re not quite sure about a heat that owes nothing to the gas boiler.

It’s lifted my spirits. Even waking early doesn’t bother me. I skip through the main section of the newspaper, impatient with the world.

Sort yourself out, foreign countries.

Stop being silly, politicians.

Don’t be so pathetic, celebrities.

And as for the magazines – HOW MUCH?!

For a handbag!?

Puh-lease.

Atheist-man finds it hard to assimilate, this cheery-morning side to me.

I’m standing in the hall with my keys, doors open, setting the alarm.

‘I’m not ready!’ he splutters.

I unset it, step outside and turn my face to the blue heavens with never a thought – I’m sorry – of God.

It’s unprecedented. We’re early enough to choose a different pew. And find the page before the singing starts.

Old fashioned hymns today. Comforting and sing-able. John Henry Newman and the like.

And a sung Latin Mass. I find the words in the Mass book for Atheist-man – he keeps looking questions at me – like giving a child a colouring book to keep him quiet.

The lessons are about the early church. Sounds dull, doesn’t it? But some tantalising things pop out. Followers of Christ don’t have to be circumcised any more – but they mustn’t eat meat that’s been strangled to death.

Odd, don’t you think, the strangled meat thing?

The priest in his sermon returns to a theme I find difficult – and he does too, I suspect. Pain, sorrow, misery in this world.

It’s all here today in the person of one sad soul. There may be many more unhappy creatures in the crowd, but I happen to know this one – let’s call him Anthony.

The first time I crossed the threshold of this church – and the reason I chose it for this experiment (as well as the 11.30 Mass, designed for sloths like me) –  was for a funeral.

I’d been living here for a couple of years and after a string of  tonsorial disasters (razor cut, anyone?) found a brilliant hairdresser. Brilliant, but – I suspect – mad.

Over weeks, months, he unravelled before my eyes.

The last time he coiffed me I washed my hair and drove round to his flat. I waited patiently as he stood before the mirror draped only in a bath towel, showing just a tiny, calculated amount of bottom cleavage.

Are warning bells ringing?

Fear not, his boyfriend, Anthony, is about to arrive.

Both men are devout. Church-going. Crucifixes are in evidence – and a statue of Our Lady.

A couple of weeks later my hairdresser was dead.

His funeral was a beautiful affair, as befitted an artist. A sculptor in three dimensions of human hair.

I see Anthony now and again. At first he was as before, just a little less present. But now he’s very much less present. He’s grey. Like a lost soul. Paralysed on one side. He limps, drags himself along like a victim of some terrible catastrophe – and that may be the truth of it.

His chest is hung with a large, full crucifix. His clothes are all biker black, like penitential robes, updated for the 21st century.

There’s no real recognition in his eyes. He looks at me and somewhere in the depths of his brain he places me.

‘Mary.’

A ghost of a smile – or did I imagine it?

He’s already looked away. Back to his prayers. To pain, sorrow and misery.

But still he prays. That’s hope, I suppose.

We leave the church and the brilliance of the day bleaches the greyness from my mind.

Down at the docks, the heat of the sun is unnerving. We wander, dazed, along the bank of the Mersey, past the grandeur of the three graces to the new Museum of Liverpool. It’s a sea shanty Sunday and in no time at all we’re joining in with ‘Hooray and up she rises’ – even though it’s not at all earl-eye in the morning.

Sierra Exif JPEG

Two sing-alongs on one Sunday.

Could winter be over, at last?

I hope so.

Posted in Religious for a year: Atheist-man's experiment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Seeking an armadillo cure, we bring no guns but find a Trigger

Posted on May 29, 2013 by memoirsofahusk

Seven in the morning and it’s twilight in the Sunrise café. The curtains are still drawn on the city of Dripping Springs, Texas.

City? Population 3000?

Whatever.

‘It’s an old building,’ says our waitress, terser than you’d expect. She’s probably been up too long already. ‘Gets hot when the sun shines. Gotta keep the windows covered.’

I’m eating a damn fine breakfast burrito. Beans, eggs and sausage, in a corn tortilla. Even the water tastes good. Could be from the dripping springs – you never know.

I step out into the blinding light of day and cross a wide, quiet road at an amble. No-one seems in much of a hurry.

Sierra Exif JPEGWe’re heading for the feed store – though we’re not in the market for feed. Elvis is on a diet. He’s a handsome cat, but his midriff could stand a reduction.

No, today we’re seeking armadillo wisdom. They’ve been digging up Thelma’s plants. Is there a cure? Other than lock and load, that is.

A bale of hay attached to a ve-hic-ule is parked outside the store. We climb the steps and I’m about to step inside when a poster stapled over the weather-crackled paint stops me in my tracks.

‘Cowboys for Christ. The trail dust ministry for cowboys and cowgirls.’Sierra Exif JPEG

Heck. You don’t get that kind of thing in the leafy shires of home.

Inside Rippy’s, the hay-bale owner leans across the counter. In the grey light of the shady shop his cowboy hat glows buttery pale. He tips it back and scratches, then tips it forward. Lifts it off his head, scratches, puts it back on. Talking real slow.

A sausage dog wanders out for a look at the strangers in town. He doesn’t bark. We’re not a threat. Not a single gun between us, much less another dog.  And we don’t bring Elvis shopping. He’s a house cat.

I’m itching to take a ride on Trigger – 25 cents it says. I shrug and walk away.  Eccentric’s my thing on a good day, but falling off a rocking horse – uh-uh. Too big a risk for just a shake of the head and a ‘what now?’

Sierra Exif JPEG

A couple of men, Mexican Americans, shift feed around in the back. One wears a baseball cap, one a cowboy hat. I nod with a smile.

‘May I take a picture?’ I ask cowboy-hat-man.

He doesn’t understand me. My bro-in-law translates. The guy shrugs a yes. I click the first attempt and make to take another. He grins.

‘Too ugly,’ he says.

He’s perfect. I thank him in English, too embarrassed to say muchas gracias. Bro-in-law obliges, polite on my behalf.

I wander round the shop, running my foreigner’s eyes over lasso ropes, shepherds’ crooks, cow’s feet. They alight on another piece of paper stapled to another wooden wall.

Hunting with hounds.

Not everyone’s idea of sport, but killing the fox ain’t the point, it says, for the Walker Fox Hounds. Most often they leave the critter to hunt another day.

Barking. That’s what they like. They hunt to hear the hounds.

By dark of night or foggy day they’ll be out there, the dogs ‘just trailing’ – barking a slow bark. As the hunt moves on, numerous doggy voices, deep and high, bark faster,  ‘Yeah, they jumped ’em’.

And in the end the hounds bark up, into the starry sky, or the misty-moisty morning. ‘He’s treed.’

The huntsmen call the dogs to their sides with a cow bell, ending the chorus of ‘Mountain Music’. That’s what they call it, the barking, Mountain Music.

Romantic types, these cowboys.

I pick up a cow bell from the shelf above the cow feet. Brass, wrapped in plastic, it clangs with a melodious, mountain clang.

I look to see where it’s made. Connecticut. Not China.

So the language of the bells is Yankee and not yer Mandarin. Makes sense. The hounds’ll understand them better. And the cows.

What’s that? Oh yes, the armadillos.

‘Wear yer t-shirts fer a few more days then lay ’em round the base of yer plants. They don’t like the smell o’humans.’

Posted in If you only read one ..., Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

In which Thelma and Louise drink wine – and have a sobering evening

Posted on May 29, 2013 by memoirsofahusk

‘Hey, Louise, we need to find us a cliff.’

That’s my sister-in-law, Thelma. Not her real name. But it kinda suits her.

Sierra Exif JPEGElvis the cat bats his tail against the floor. It’s his real name and he recognises it.

He’s a cat with attitude.

Cattitude, you might say.

‘I seen me a vineyard out in that there hill country,’ drawls Thelma,  ‘What say we go get us a glass o’ that chilled chard-o-nnay?’

I say, a helluva a lot better than driving off a cliff. I mean, this isn’t Groundhog Day. And, fortunately, neither is it Thelma and Louise.

It started about five or six years ago. Not enough room for us all in one car so Thelma and I took off, on our own, in hers.

It’s weird what even a tiny pinch of rebellion can do. Like a shaking of salt in a tasteless soup. Take a different turn on the way home, play some country music and – whoosh – we’re two wild women out of a film.

But let’s be clear, we don’t rob or shoot. Though I did buy a copy of ‘Western Shooting Journal’ at the HEB supermarket in Dripping Springs.

‘Duck Dynasty,’ runs the headline.

‘Guns, God and the pursuit of happiness,’ they add by way of explanation.

You just have to find out more, don’t you?

No?

Well, how about, ‘Archery Zombie Safari,’ then?

I give up.

Back to the quest for wine.

We’re driving through Texas hill country – and it puts me in mind of Africa. Sparse grasses. Parched-looking trees, haloed with dusty green. Tough as they come. You wouldn’t pick a fight with one out of choice.

Thelma takes a left turn and soon we’re trailing dust. It’s a pretty good dirt track that snakes on up, through a lush-looking vineyard, to the top of the hill (no cliff). We stop. There’s one other car.

An earnest looking couple sits in the shade, heads nearly touching, sipping from long-stemmed glasses. We leave them to their intimacy.

The winery’s a low stone building, cool in the heat of the afternoon. We walk out (after paying, I told you we don’t rob) with two bottles of dry-ish Muscat –  well, two bottles minus two glasses. They hold the chilled liquid we sip on the hill.

IMG_1708It’s scorching out here in a way we never feel in England, not even on the hottest day.  A vivid green cactus basks in the rays as our white wine warms to the weather.

We should have chosen the shade. But that couple’s still there. Thelma takes the glasses back and I sit, silent, scanning the valley below.

It’s a good job the cliff thing’s a joke. I ain’t ready to die yet and anyways, the hills round here are pretty minor. Drive off and we’d probably just roll to the bottom and crawl out with terrible injuries.

‘Let’s go back the usual way, down the road, shall we?’ I say, as the air-con kicks in.

As we sit on the deck that evening watching the sky, the searing sun vanishes. Clouds move in across the entire horizon. A strong wind blows the weather up north and lightning flashes across the sky – a hundred miles away.

The thunder misses us. The tornado misses us. But a lot of people in Oklahoma will lose their lives tonight.

I won’t be joking about dying again, not any time soon.

Posted in Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Oh dear. Someone’s been reading my blog. Was it you?

Posted on May 25, 2013 by memoirsofahusk

Dear People-who-have-followed-me-since-I-was-Freshly-Pressed,

I don’t know if it’s the done thing to send you a letter, but does that matter? After all, I don’t exist, do I? If anyone can get away with it I can. So …

Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I am thrilled and pleased at your likes and comments. I’m also a bit stressed.

Freshly Stressed, you might say.

Wobbling about writing.

Will you like the next one? What if you’re disappointed? Why am I so insecure? Oops, sorry, that one just slipped in.

And I have jet lag!

Some of you have already heard back from me via slippery fingers sliding over the keyboard in hot, humid Texas. I’ll reply to everyone who commented, but while I sort out my lagged brain and untangle my washing here are a few general responses to your thoughtful, kind, stimulating remarks.

Women who have been able to relate to what I said, hello to you, I’m waving! So nice to hear from you – it’s as if we’ve stepped out from behind a screen to take a bow.

And you men who made good and sensible, silly and flattering comments – a teeny curtsey to you.

Those of you who said sad things, a hug for you. Please, think more of yourselves. You are someone, trust me. Fat or thin, old or young, fit or unfit, able or less able, we are who we are and that’s not nothing.

I’ll be back soon with a ‘real’ post. There’s lots of stuff bubbling up, some about my Texas trip, some about life, the universe and nothing, some about our local – no, Roger, John and the sandy asparagus can wait.

So, please bear with me, you may not like the next blog, or even the one after that, but one day another one will come along that speaks to you – I hope.

And if not, well it’s been very good to meet you!

Now, where was I?

Posted in Thinking, or ranting, or both | Tagged , | 18 Comments