The writer Milan Kundera has died at the age of 94. It is noted with a passing sentence or two in the papers, a mention on the evening news and a few more paragraphs in obituaries in England and Europe. Salman Rushdie took a quote from ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’  “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” And this is why there are novels, poems, songs and biographies of work and of people written – to hold onto what we know as true for as long as possible remembering the stepping stones that were laid down for our work and we provide for those that follow.

And as that came to mind, a seventeen-year-old granddaughter stepped through the cottage doors for a visit with her now ‘over 80’ grandparents and we had things to do. Two bus rides took us to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the exhibit of Divas. Headphones in place we were ushered down the darkened steps to Gallery 40, first into the world of opera with the costumes and cracked voice of Maria Callas. Moving from window to window for the first time I look on these early opera singers as brave and courageous women paving their own pathways for independence for singers and actresses to follow. Billie Holliday is shown in a photographic negative of her only performance at the Albert Hall in 1954. Between the flickering pictures of Theda Bara playing the first Cleopatra on film in 1917, we pass display cases showing those who were destroyed by the systems they tried to conquer: Marilyn Monroe, and Judy Garland are seen smiling bravely. Then comes Elizabeth Taylor playing the same queen Cleopatra in 1963 as she commands Mark Anthony to kneel before her. It’s beautiful stuff and when I emerge from the darkness – the exhibit continues upstairs – there are the brilliant costumes of Prince, Cher, Elton John and countless others. I can make it around the exhibit once before I get dizzy with all this courage displayed before me. As the granddaughter goes around and around I sit and think of these divas – of female and male inclinations – all pushing the boundaries of their times. Within this exhibit are the milestones that bring us from Marie Callas to Marian Anderson performing at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, to the civil rights movement, through Cher, Elton John to the Beyoncé of today.

We find our way to the old tea rooms with their tiled walls, porcelain columns and stained glass windows. There are far too many pastries and not enough small plates of good-for-you food but we slide a pot of tea and scones onto a tray and manage a tea-time moment to sit down and take in what we have seen and look about us – at old and young England with some European and Asian families who are also taking this moment to pause and refresh. I am caught seeing a young Japanese family sitting at a table close by, parents with a slightly older daughter and the younger brother who is having trouble with his broccoli. His father helps him out – spooning some strands of vegetable back into the boy’s mouth and scraping some away to his own plate. But it is the mother who is striking. She sits calmly, casually watchful as a lioness teaching her young cubs to eat for themselves. Her face is long and strictly angular, half of her black hair is pulled back and held roughly high on her head with a band. The angle of her jaw, the rise of her hair are ancient and familiar both.

Since childhood, I have seen her on the pages of books of paintings of Japanese art and culture but here she is in the 21st century – utterly beautiful in her casual modern clothes. I wonder at this Japanese family so seemingly on vacation in England, visiting the week that the Oppenheimer film opens to worldwide audiences. What history are they reliving as they come here? 

Meanwhile, summer’s slow tides are ebbing and flowing with little wavelets rippling through our political history. Because of the obtuse behaviour on the one hand and downright disgraceful on another, three conservative members of Parliament have had to resign their seats in government and go back to oiling their lawnmowers in the countryside. Three countywide elections were held in one night. Uxbridge and South Ruislip did bring home another conservative with Steve Tuckwell. Keir Mather took a Labour seat in Selby and Ainsty while Somerset and Frome chose a woman, Sarah Dyke, for the Liberal Democrats, nice little wins for the Labour and Liberal Democratic parties each. It is small potatoes given what is going on in England and the world but they are potatoes. Desks will be shuffled, phones re-arranged, email accounts set up along with new websites – all promising to right what is wrong with this country – at the moment. And though those promises will hardly be fulfilled they could indeed change the way forward just enough to tack this listing boat of a country onto a kinder course.

And we so need this with the sight of the Bibby Stockholm barge anchored off of Portland Harbour in Dorset – though registered at Bridgetown Barbados. It is now refurbished to hold 506 single men who arrived in Kent seeking UK Asylum. The men are called asylum seekers – not refugees – and it is a reminder of when we were called registered aliens rather than immigrants, and that language is important. As well as the 506 asylum seekers there are 18 – trained to Military standards (whatever that means) security guards along with cooks and cleaners to a total staff of 60. It is a  floating prison for want of a better word – a ship to discourage sea-faring migrants from crossing to this small Island.

Whatever they say about it – and they try to say a lot – the idea of putting 506 young men in a boat with only 60 more to lend a helping hand providing essentials, may not have the same outcome as the owl and the pussycat who sailed out to sea – in a beautiful pea-green boat.

This has been A Letter From A. Broad. Written and read for you by Muriel Murch.