A ‘Sandinista’ too far

Posted on February 6, 2013 by memoirsofahusk

The sea-glass sky is shimmering – or is it the sea? No telling the difference – well except for the waves.

‘I’ve called someone in to help,’ says Sarkozy-man when asked how his knife-edge of a deal is going, ‘a friend from Sierra Leone, a Sandinista.’

He laughs

I ask, ‘really?’- because that’s my role in this scene.

He laughs again. ‘No, but we were there together.’

Worlds collide. Some are brittle. Some are soft. Some are vulcanised rubber.

‘Sarkozy’ – vulcanised rubber man.

Not usually one to miss the chance to observe a new edition of a type, I’m suddenly world-weary. I’m not up for this game. I smile a smile which I intend to seem vaguely impressed and humbled, but I’m not sincere. I’m tired.

I stumble back across the tropical equivalent of grass, strewn with builders’ rubble and desiccated palm leaves, to our room, where I sit on our little verandah.

It’s late afternoon. I look up from my distressing book (bought in haste, I’m repenting at leisure) to see another ‘type’ has found ‘Sarkozy’. Her hair’s up in a carefully careless chignon. Her deportment is perfect, her back straight, her neck long. I can’t see her body but already know it’s slender and her feet are bare.

‘Sarkozy’ is out of his seat and off to the surf. She follows, peeling off her gauzy wrap to reveal an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, no-room-for-a-yellow-polka-dot bikini.

To my right, a few doors down stands a not-too-tall black man with a broad frame. He’s wearing a blast of a shirt, boasts a Bob Marley (but let’s be honest, neater) hair-do and he’s surveying the building works. By his side is a white woman, middle years just settling upon her, nondescript short hair and unassuming clothes. Now there’s a story.

Posted in Ghana | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Sarkozy’s’ breakfast

Posted on February 5, 2013 by memoirsofahusk

He’s not really M. Sarkozy, but he could be his body double. Of mixed North African/Norwegian descent, he’s been drinking Guinness for breakfast. He’s on his second. Every now and then he jumps up from his seat and puts his mobile phone on a rock in the sun.

I’m sitting under a thatched shelter facing the sea. The harmattan winds, carrying sand from the Sahara, are keeping the heat and humidity down, but also rendering the view a silvery opaque.

Sarkozy-man’s wearing black cropped trousers and nothing else. Wiry, he’s just the tinted side of northern-climate-pale. He’s been working on a deal. Oil. It’s disintegrating as he speaks – and he’s a stress bucket.

In this continent that stretches the minds – and the credulity – of all who venture here, you start to recognise types after a while. He’s a type.

I hear his story second-hand, I’m not his style. He chats instead to archaeo-man, enticing him into his shady lair as he strolls by.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ he smiles, ‘that is, if you have a minute or two’.

Everyone has a minute or two in Africa.

We’ve been advised against swimming – riptides, strong currents – but of course Sarkozy-man is in there. Again. And again. And again.

Eventually he heads back to his room and we colonise his shady space. No sun loungers here, just hefty Ghanaian wood chairs with cushions bleeding colour in the sand-salt air.

Sarkozy is, inevitably, drawn back to his ocean.

He pads back from his latest bout of tempting fate to join us under the thatch. Laying a handful of lumpy wet sand on the table he spreads it out with nervy fingers, each movement fast but strenuously constrained. Like a croupier, or a magician.

Are those little pebbles? No, they’re tiny shellfish.

‘These are too small or I could have them for breakfast, I could do a ceviche.’

‘Here, have some lime,’ I offer.

We’ve just had our own little adventure – tea made of shredded ginger and mint, great clumps of it like pondweed floating in the pot. A little jug of honey, the colour of molasses – and half a lime each.

We’re all different. Some find danger in tea, some in – well, nothing at all, it seems.

One more dangerous dip and he’s back with more sand. Bigger shells this time and an almost stone-age-tool, ‘to open them with’.

He hands archaeo-man a sea-worn artefact, masquerading as an ammonite. Is it a bottle cap? An ancient battery end?

‘There, a find for the archaeologist. Ha!’

He toddles off, chuckling, to the other thatched shelter. Archaeo-man’s eyes can’t help but follow.

‘He’s eating them.’

He’s right.

Breakfast.

Not for me, thank you.

[technology failed me yesterday – more to come, just been bitten by a mosquito damn it]

.

Posted in Ghana | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Frank woz here

Posted on February 3, 2013 by memoirsofahusk

That was a bit irreverent, sorry.  Francis was here.  Sir Francis Drake. He of the Armada, bowls and round the world sailing.

‘Here’ is Accra, Ghana.  For weeks I’ve avoided thinking about this trip.  I did next-to-no preparation, other than checking my yellow fever certicate was valid and being dragged into the travel clinic to make sure all the usual stuff was up-to-date.  Good not to have to worry about rabies, anyway.

I began to feel the little African lovebite itching after I saw archaeo-man’s brand-spanking-new yellow fever card. Ha ha!  Mine expires in July, nearly ten years old, battered, faded, fraying around the edges and creased.  Like a scuffed luggage label it says, ‘are we there yet?’, in a weary, excited, anxious, exhilirated voice.

But then it wore off.  I won’t bore you with the anxiety, sleepless nights, indigestion and over-consumption of red wine that were the price of ignoring the trip ahead.  Instead…

Here we are.  Ghana is beating Gabon one nil at the moment according to Joshua, who just brought us coffee by mistake, with one ear piece trailing from an ear, desperate to get back to the football.

The palm trees look a little the worse for wear, here on the coast of West Africa.  The perpetual motion of the vast ocean, wiping its feet on the doormat but not, thank God, coming in. Whoosh, swoosh, ca-poooosh.

A woman walks along the beach with a pastel coloured bundle on her head.  A boy rolls a tyre.  A building worker hurls his tiny puppy into the waves again and again and again.  He tried leaving it in the sand, but it cried for him.He cradles it in his arms as he heads back to work. 

A popcorn seller wheels his trolley towards the other side of the beach and town.  Two youths chase the incoming tide on bikes.

At the end of our priviledged patch of ground rises a hill of what looks like rubble, brick crumbs mixed with sand.  A procession of women in wrap-around African cloth walks up, down, up, down, up…  One has a baby tied around her back inside the traditional cloth.  Each carries a basket on her head.  The baskets are full of clay and sand which is destined for a pottery where it will be used for making “beautiful round pots”.

A woman’s work is never done.

[pictures when I get back home – forgot the lead!]

Posted in Ghana | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Meet Gerry Carroll – son, brother, friend, sometime sleuth (and Catholic priest)

Posted on January 20, 2013 by memoirsofahusk

It felt like bleak midwinter, the earth standing hard as iron, even if no frosty wind made moan.

For Gerry, it couldn’t have been a bleaker day.  Was it midwinter? He didn’t really care if it was or it wasn’t. He stared into the rectangular hole at his feet, a gaping black gash in the snow. The snow that had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow.

He thought on all those wooden boxes, the smell of floral tributes decaying in the sun – or rain. He saw the huddles of people. Families holding it together for the occasion, passing acquaintances crying their eyes out, men hiding their fears behind hands or handkerchiefs. And now it was his turn. He looked up.

The sky, a billowing canvas of tainted grey, was stretched with snow that had yet to descend. The child in him hoped it would fall in great flurries, with giant flakes icing the hats and bare heads, whiting black coats, denying the mourning.

The bell began its dull tolling. He stamped his feet, turned and walked towards the church.

The vintage Triumph was where he had left it. An old man had stepped inside the church’s garden to look.

‘Ah, good morning, Father, I thought I recognised it. She’s a real beauty.’ Then, realising why Gerry was there, he shook his head and assumed a grim expression. ‘I was sorry to hear about your dad. Is it today?’

Gerry nodded. ‘And I’m going to be late if I’m not careful, promised I’d go in the car with my mum and my sister. Will I see you at the Mass, Joe?’

The old man looked a little sheepish. ‘No, wife’s got the dinner on. But we’ll be thinking of you.’

He gave a sort of nod of his head and hurried off down the road.

Gerry kicked off his dad’s old turquoise Triumph, its silver trim gleaming despite the gloom, and rode the short distance home. There would be crowds at the Mass. His dad had not had the chance to retire, to lose the contacts a headmaster made. Dropped dead at the end of the school’s nativity play. Ironic, really.

Yes, all those years of dedication to the children of the town had made him not just a well-known figure, but a well-loved one, Gerry liked to believe.

Old Joe would not be missed in the crowd. Would not be welcome, some would say. His son had murdered Gerry’s uncle, his dad’s baby brother. He corrected himself. His dead dad’s baby brother.

None of them would ever forget it, especially Gerry. The image never faded. But it was a priest’s duty to forgive.

He tried.

Posted in Fiction, probably | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Thinking for the world?

Posted on January 15, 2013 by memoirsofahusk

[Warning: I’m about to use the word ‘praying’ as part of an attempt to have an original thought. Be patient – this isn’t really about religion. Well, not as we know it.]

Did you hear Sister Wendy on Desert Island Discs?* She’s praying for us all, she said. Praying is what she does. Every day, for hours and hours and hours. Alone.

Tears welled up in my eyes.

It’s an odd feeling, believing someone is praying for me, even though she doesn’t know me. But she is, of course, because she’s praying for everyone.

And I’m one of everyone.

There’s a strong religious tradition of isolation from the mainstream. Christianity (to name but the one I’m most familiar with) has its contemplative orders of monks and nuns. It has hermits. Anchorites. And anchoresses.

All those quiet, prayerful men and women should have been bolstering us up, unasked, for centuries. A cushion of grace. A chorus of prayer curling around us all, making things better. Maybe it has been. We might have been worse – even worse – without those selfless voices.

But now, I think we need a brave new breed of contemplatives. Not for prayer, but just for casual, everyday, yes-but, what-if, well-you-know thinking.

It’s not entirely an age thing, though I guess it’s more likely amongst the older folk, but don’t you worry about when people think?

Earphones, iPhones, headphones, trombones. No, sorry, that didn’t work did it?

But here’s my point. People – many people, if not most – take their distractions with them wherever they go.

No time to chat to the check-out person, must discuss the cat’s bald spot with my weird cousin five times removed.

No way I’m going to ride my bike and just listen to the birds sing, nah, I’ve got Elbow on my iPod.

Dinner with the wife? Must Tweet that starter, sounds disgusting. Pin a pic on Pinterest too. There.

What did you say?

Come on, tell me, when do people think? When do the random thoughts (from the random thought generator in the sky) make it through the noise of it all?

So this is it. My new role for writers. The new monks. Or nuns. Or hermits.  Not sure I want to be an anchoress, mind.

*[Sister Wendy Beckett is a nun, for 40 years a hermit, who lives in a caravan in the grounds of a Carmelite monastery. She is also an art critic. I’ve sort of paraphrased what she says about praying for us all. Desert Island Discs is a BBC radio programme in which the subject being interviewed chooses 8 ‘discs’ with which to be marooned on a desert island, a book and a luxury. You can find out what Sister Wendy’s luxury is if you listen to this all the way through, or skip to the end if you must! It’s fantastic. You can listen to the programme on the BBC until December 2013. Follow this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p9g3w%5D

 

Posted in Thinking, or ranting, or both | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Bonfire of the insanities

Posted on January 3, 2013 by memoirsofahusk

The track is overgrown with tall grass, but a vehicle definitely passed this way, once upon a time. That should be a comfort, but it isn’t.

I peer at the guide book in the yellow light of my torch and try to sound confident.

‘It should be along here somewhere. On the right.’

I doubt anything’s along here, actually. Much less a campsite. But at least we’re not sinking. Yet. Why did I read that story? Six months before they got the vehicle out – with a helicopter.

We’re not prepared for this. No sleeping bags. No blankets. We do have food and bottles of water but I haven’t drunk anything for hours now. I dread the thought of stopping the vehicle again and getting out to pee. Experiencing that sinking feeling for real.

Despair is gaining the upper hand when I spy the flicker of flames and a large fire,  a veritable bonfire, illuminates a cluster of small grass huts.

Thank God!

It’s the campsite. Despite the look of the place, I feel relieved.

I should have known better.

We turn off the track and approach the fire.

That’s when we see them.

Several shapes appear behind the leaping flames. Men in dark clothing, wearing black Dunlops* and carrying big sticks. At least, that’s what I hope they are.

One man makes his way round to the front of the fire.

‘You cannot stay here.’

We’ve been in scrapes before in rural Zambia. People appear from nowhere to help, expecting nothing, happy with a lift, a handshake, a packet of biscuits. Thrilled if we have a Kwacha note or two to spare. So this is not looking good. Not good at all. In fact, it’s looking what you might call sinister.

‘We are lost,’ pleads anthro-man, ‘we need to stay the night.’

‘You cannot stay here. Where are you going?’

We tell him.

He waves an arm – no, he shakes it, as in fist – in the direction we were heading before we turned off.

‘Thirty minutes that way. Go straight. Keep going.’

We don’t really have much choice.

The tall grass disappears and our meagre headlights shine on flat ground – or is it a shallow lake? In the dim starlight we can just make out a causeway, slightly raised above ground level, the obvious way to drive across this floodplain.

‘It says not to take the causeway,’ I say, desperately wanting to take the high ground. ‘Too damaged, worse than crossing the swamp at this time of year.’

There, I said it, swamp.

I can hear the shoosssshhhhhh of the water, as the tyres roll on.

‘Aim for the tree,’ I say.

Bloody guide book. Puny headlights, star light – they’re not much use when you’re scanning a vast horizon for one solitary tree.

By now I’m beyond frightened, I’m terrified. We can’t stop. We’ve no idea where we’re going. Are we going in the right direction? Did that man tell the truth?

I clutch the guide book, the printout of directions and the torch as if rigor mortis has set in. I bite my top lip. Then my bottom lip.

Anthro-man grips the steering wheel as if his life depends on it, hunched over, head close to the windscreen, peering into the night.

What seems at first like a dark cloud but is actually a wave of dark, moving forms appears to one side, rushing headlong towards us. It’s a vast herd of Black Lechwe antelopes, but we can’t stop. I cringe as if they’re going to hit us.

The herd parts and passes us, front and back, like a wave round a ship, as we make our slow way across their territory.

I wonder if we’ll ever be able to stop. We might end up in the Congo. It’s not very far away now.

It’s not a comforting thought.

*Wellingtons or gumboots

Posted in Zambia | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The tolling of the iron bell*

Posted on December 30, 2012 by memoirsofahusk

The faithful have been called to their knees. Odd, isn’t it, kneeling? But if nothing else, it concentrates the mind, ready for hearing softly spoken spells.

It’s the fourth Sunday of Advent, our fourth Mass (yes, I’m with the atheist**), but as it comes to an end I’m still taken by surprise. We’ve said ‘thanks be to God’ (no doubt with differing interpretations in heads around the church), we’re on our feet and it’s time to depart, but then –

clang …

clang …

clang …

‘the Angel of the Lord declares unto Mary,’ says the priest.

It must be nearly twenty years since I last responded to that declaration, yet it comes without a thought. I feel it – not ‘feel’ as in emotion, but as in its rhythm.

‘And she conceived by the Holy Ghost.’

I take part without any conscious effort.

My wandering mind sees a book of hours, exquisite pictures in luminous colours, embellished with gold. Toiling peasants bent over rows of vines. A castle, or maybe a church, perched on a hill in the background. I think of Little Crosby, its church surveying the fields from a modest advantage of height – there not being many hills to speak of round here.

I see farm workers labouring, lifting their heads at midday as a great iron voice bids them, ‘cease’. Pausing in their work they lift their eyes from the soil to the heavens, hearing the Angelus on some celestial plane. Mouthing Hail Marys, making the sign of the cross, kneeling as the Word becomes flesh.

The bell tolling, tolling, tolling. The muttered words rustling through their brains.

The last clang dies away and it’s back to the swinging of the scythe, the heaving of the hoe, the cultivation of earth’s fruits. To the terrestrial pulse, its cyclical rhythms.

Seasons, tides, the ever changing sky. Green shoots reborn. Flowers blooming yellow and white. Leaves turning crimson and gold as life departs. Skeletal branches black against the ice-blue winter light.

My young life wasn’t lived to those terrestrial rhythms, but to the seemingly endless rites of school and church. It was a family thing – headmaster, school secretary, a teacher – briefly (my sister).

At 18 I left for university. Unleashed, I partied like there was no tomorrow, but every Sunday morning would see Ros and me pedalling up the High Street to Mass at 11am – come rain, shine or hangover. Bookends, a friend called us, at the Chaplaincy.

It had to end. Ros died. I sank into London, with its endless charms and poisons. But I stayed the course alone.

Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter.  Whitsuntide.  The purple month, November. The souls waiting for our petitions, silent and calm. ‘Their lips no prayer can utter…’

Then Advent all over again. And again. And again.

But then…

He was a strange priest. He got very, very drunk and sang in the bars in the little commuter town outside Bath where we lived, atheist and I. He’d had polio when young and limped. He’d been a roadie for a band – he said. And he didn’t mince his words. Called me a vixen. Where university, frequent flying, illicit love affairs, rationalist boyfriends and my atheist husband had failed, he succeeded. I stopped. Just like that.

These days I work from home and freelance. We have no children, I have no office colleagues, no religion. There’s no longer any rhythm to my life, I must create my own.

And now?

The atheist says he might want to do a whole year of this Mass-going thing.

I did say the age of miracles was not yet past, didn’t I? He doesn’t know what he has unleashed.

And so, dear readers, given this Christmas tide is still upon us, please forgive me if I say to you – may whoever or whatever is your God-equivalent bless you, every one.

*[apologies to Pink Floyd for using their words as inspiration]

**he says he’s not an agnostic and never said so. I think he did but am not prepared to argue that one. Also, that second priest in that last blog, while we’re on the subject of getting things wrong, was a deacon. But it was still impressive!

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