A Man for All Seasons | Muriel Murch

Written and read for you with WSM by my side

A book to read – one I had hoped would be more satisfying. So at 2 AM I lie awake and fuss wondering what – if anything I can say to the author. And how to calm myself? In times of unease, poetry always helps. Michael Ondaatje’s ‘A Year of Lost Things’ is on my nightstand, poetry with just a page or two of prose remembrances slipped between the stanzas. It is enough and for the next few nights I am lulled to sleep with the beauty of his words. In one section of remembrances, he writes of a friend who becomes the muse for a brother in ‘Anil’s Ghost,’ first published in 2000 and – as one thing leads to another – I search for the book in our local community library. There it is, I take it home and turning the pages am taken back to our 2004 visit to Sri Lanka.

Our visit had fallen easily into place after Walter’s teaching for ten days at the Indian Film School in Pune. Walter had long wanted to go Sri Lanka to visit the Green Memorial Hospital in Jaffna where his maternal Grandparents, Thomas Beckett Scott and Mary Elizabeth MacCallum Scott had, from 1893-1913, worked as medical missionaries.

Mary Elizabeth was the first female doctor to work in Jaffna, while at the same time she birthed seven children and started the first nursing school in Manipay which is still in existence today. I wonder about her story, for Mary was the child of deeply Christian parents. She first trained as a teacher, then as a nurse before completing a medical degree in Kingston, Ontario, repeating exams at the Bellevue Hospital in New York. She was one of the first five women to receive a medical degree in America, but maybe getting a degree did not equal getting a job. Did that play a role in their decision to become medical missionaries? She reminds me of another exemplary woman physician, Dame Cicely Saunders, who founded the modern day Hospice movement. Dame Cicely also began her adult life as a nurse before becoming a social worker and then a physician.

Edwardo stops us for a snack of Water Buffalo yogurt and honey

But the Green Memorial Hospital is in the Northern province of Jaffna, a strong Tamil district and during out time the war was still active. Michael had guided us to the Kandalama Hotel, designed by his friend the architect Geoffrey Bawa and built into the hillside outside of Kandy. Edwardo drove us for five hours and that was as far as we got.

Everyone was very polite but clear, explaining as gently as they could that the troubles precluded them sending anyone with us to Jaffna and certainly not allowing us on the trains where murder was not uncommon. The Civil War that had begun in 1983 was ongoing and didn’t settle until 2009. We didn’t take it in – and in our ignorance remained enjoying the peace, the water, the birds, and the Buddhas, those hidden in caves, sitting or lying about – though never standing, and the Golden Buddha in Dambulla shining from the hillside across the lake. The Seven Kingdoms of Sri Lanka had been beaten almost into one, the two languages of Sinhala and Tamil remaining the tear in the Island’s fabric. The Portuguese arrived first, then the Dutch to harvest cinnamon and other spices before the British came trading Christianity for tea. It was all rather messy. This week, Sri Lanka welcomes Anura Kumar as their new Left of Center President. Namaste we say to you.

But we didn’t know much about this then. We were immersed in a new culture and beyond grateful for the opportunities and understanding that this time had brought to us. It wasn’t until now, re-reading ‘Anil’s Ghost’ that I came to a glimmer of understanding about what was happening, never mind why and to whom in this country. In an interview, Hilary Mantel, when speaking about history said, “I think novelists are alert for everything historians can find and verify, but also for something different, and extra; history’s unconscious, if you like. You try to grasp an individual’s moment-by-moment experience, as the tides of the past and present wash through them.”

And maybe that is partly why I feel so lost looking about me now. The wars that we are shown remain in the present tense. In Ukraine it is the old women well into their 80’s being packed up to leave their village homes. What can they take with them? Not the last of the harvest from their cottage gardens, the chickens still raising a brood of chicks, but maybe a blanket, a change of clothes, a photograph or two. In Gaza, Israel, Lebanon and Palestine urban rubble with shards of clothes caught on rebar are all that some survivors can find. The Israeli and Hamas leaders, lunging forward like attack dogs straining and then retreating, have been unleashed and given over to the pure fury of warfare and this latest weapon, of first thousands of pagers and then the walkie-talkies blowing up in pockets and hands. There will be over 500 dead in Lebanon before this letter reaches you. These are the things that weigh the heart down.

But meanwhile in our small country, the Annual Labour Party Conference is happening in Liverpool. The Prime Minister assured us last week that “I’m in Control.” We begin to wonder what exactly is he in control of? There is the matter of Sue Gray, his Chief of Staff having a higher salary than him. If she can keep everyone playing by an honour code of written and unwritten rules then good for her she has earned it. But can she? Digging for dirt the media finds that Sir Keir has a new box of tickets for the Arsenal Football season and a very nifty and expensive pair of glasses. The glasses follow his ‘I’m a serious fellow’ style but don’t look a whole lot better than my husband’s from the local pharmacy that cost £7.50. Then there are the clothes for the girls. Wife Victoria in a dress and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner in a billowing too-bright green trouser-suit, both from the new up and coming English fashion house MEEM, look quite smart. But the women beside Sir Keir, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Chancellor Rachael Reeves, also looking very smart, need to learn to say their lines without glaringly staring at the teleprompter, widening their mouths with animated articulation. They look like a python getting ready to swallow a sheep, and it could be that ‘we the workers’ are the sheep. They are pushing their vocals in a bid for political authority afraid that any other womanly tone will sound weak.

In Fred Zinnemann’s 1966 film ‘A Man for All Seasons’, Paul Schofield who plays Sir Thomas More, converses with Richie Rich played by John Hurt. Earlier Richie had asked More for a place in Court. More declined, suggesting Richie become a teacher. But Richie gets his place and a golden Goblet. At the river’s edge, More sees the Goblet, looks up to Richie “For Wales Richie, For Wales?” Richie’s shame and humiliation are clear on his face. The cup is dropped into the river.

I don’t see football tickets being returned but maybe fewer parcels, with the compliments of … will be accepted or signed for on the steps of number 10 Downing Street.

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

And always supported by https://www.murchstudio.com

Recorded and Knit together by WSM

Six months into this strange lockdown year many of us are still struggling to find our old normal life patterns or create and accept new ones. Families, communities, and countries are so ripped apart by war, disease and fires, that this may never happen again in their life times. The natural world is in deep fury and sorrow and has serious indigestion from humanity’s greedy excesses. For support or solace some people return to their religions, some look to science, hardly anyone looks to their politicians. In this house there are books and charts from the I–Ching, Runes and Astrology.

Anne Ortelee sends out biweekly astrology posts. I read them yet I can’t begin to fathom all the planetary positions in the heavens that she explains. Planets are joining up, and flying back to whence they came. When she reflects back into history, I always learn something new. It’s been more than 500 years since the last time that Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto all met together in Capricorn; in the autumn of 1517, just a couple of weeks after Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door and set off the Protestant Reformation.

But at this point in time it looks like trouble for America and much of the world all tumbling on into political and natural chaos.

The people of Belarus are not giving up. Another big protest rally in Minsk showed Lukashenko’s riot police, now almost completely encased in armor that makes them look like rolling armadillos, attacking protesters and bundling those they think are the remaining opposition leaders into vans and taking them away. The country’s interior minister says 774 people had been detained on Sunday.

On Monday, Lukashenko flew to Sochi to meet with Putin at Putin’s Black Sea resort home. This is Lukashenko’s first trip outside the country since the protests began after the August elections. Russian news agencies report that Russia will send paratroopers to Belarus for 10 days of military exercises entitled “Slavic brotherhood”. It is yet to be seen what else Putin will do to help the old warrior who has now interrupted Putin’s holiday break – or will Lukashenko fall ill, and not make it back home to Belarus. Such things do happen.

Alexei Navalny is up and conscious and anxious to return to Russia. Two German laboratories have independently confirmed that he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok. Suspicions remain strong that the poison was probably in a cup of tea he drank at Omsk airport before boarding a flight to Moscow last week. His team lost no time in blaming Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin spokesperson, remains completely dismissive of such suggestions.

Alexei Navalny with his wife and daughters in Berlin. Photo from Sky News

Following the English government rules for the COVID-19 situation is like playing a game of hop-scotch on a chalked-out pavement that has been twisted and blurred by the rain. Back and forth until this week Boris, Matt – and maybe deeply hidden behind a scientific puppet, Dominic – have come up with the Rule of Six, nicked one can be sure from a catchy-sounding chapter heading in a book on film lying about in Dom’s editing suite. What is right for film and the arts is completely useless for this epidemic situation. Professors Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson write in the Spectator, “Our leaders amount to little more than a Dad’s Army of highly paid individuals with little or no experience of the job at hand.” Their long article reads like a doomsday book of despair and the writers barely touch on the failures of Matt Hancock’s Track and Trace schemes.

Moving from one debortle to another, Boris last week announced that he was going to flout, that is break, an agreement with the European Union on the Trade Deal that he made, and celebrated as a victory, just nine months ago. Suddenly this has given past Prime Ministers something to get excited about, join in unity around, and enjoy a new photo opportunity. John Major and Tony Blair are seen smiling and looking sweetly neat walking together across the Peace Bridge. Both probably chuckling at this dig to Johnson. David Cameron has cautiously joined the chorus but did not see fit to walk the plank with Major and Blair. He is a young man and may still have hopes of a political life before him. But he did say that “Passing an act of Parliament and then going on to break an international treaty obligation is the very, very last thing you should contemplate. It should be an absolute final resort. So, I do have misgivings about what’s being proposed.”

“See Thomas, See how you have angered me so!” Henry VIII roars, on a supposedly surprise visit, to Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s’ “A Man for All Seasons.” It seems that it is this wrath that politicians fear, but what I can’t yet figure out: who is playing Henry?

So much politics to think and write about. All pushing back the desperately important thoughts and ideas needed in this time of Global Warming and the eruption of this pandemic experience. Last year we looked in amazed horror when the Australian bush went up in flames. This year California is following the fire season’s pattern of Australia, with ‘some fires in 2019’ becoming the whole of the western states of America in 2020. In both continents the fire season is barely beginning.

Meanwhile Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Lesvos continue to burn and drown with no helping hands in sight.

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