Hilary Mantel

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

Easter Weekend in London brings news and time for reflection.

Some days swirl by in a non-specific haze, leading to a confusion of thought, and a seeming inability to get anything done, so that the by day’s end one wonders what did actually happen. Like older relatives and parents who cut out articles from the newspapers and mailed them to us, we now swap internet links and stories. “I thought you might be interested in …” and we often are.

Thomas arrived for my birthday. He had been hinted at, noted, ordered from our local book shop and was wrapped up to serve beside a pot of coffee for breakfast.

Hilary Mantel’s “The Mirror and the Light” brings Thomas Cromwell’s life to an end. For three days and nights I managed to resist him, continuing to read an evening chapter from “Jock of the Bushveld” an old favorite book of my mother’s.

But before even a week was over, I had picked up the hefty tome of 880 pages. I said (to myself) “I’ll just take a peek”, as if “I’ll just go for a drink with him. It’s nothing. I can get up and leave whenever I want.” But now Jock is laid aside, and Thomas has my heart and mind. I love him, more than a little bit, and am infinitely in awe of and grateful to Hilary Mantel. I am not alone. Others I know read him in this gifted time of solitude. We will go with him to his end and close the book with sadness.

When Susan Sontag published ‘The Volcano Lover’ in 1992, she went on her book tour. I was fascinated with the history and had lots of questions prepared for speaking with her at KPFA, Pacifica. But as the conversation relaxed and drew to a close, I asked about living alone in New York City. “Are you ever lonely?” “How could I be,” she responded. “I have two thousand years of history in my library.”

Here in London we both have small libraries crammed full of books that we cherish. We are both re-readers, I returning to history while he explores science. Though I’m a one-at-a-time gal there are at least seven books piled behind “The Mirror and the Light”.

My father would have been in his 70’s when I was first old enough to become conscious of his reading habit. And for him, too, this age was a time of re-reading books that he welcomed back into his life as long lost friends.

Saturday morning began in the new quiet, but by noon a helicopter began to circle overhead. There is no Prince traveling from one palace to another, and the air ambulance is hardly needed now that the London streets are almost empty of traffic. This is the police, boys with their toys, circling Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park looking for those, oh no, sunbathers and loiterers. Later, when we take our walk a police patrol car is cruising The Broad Walk. They are not walking to give a face to their presence, nor even on horseback when I might get lucky with a bag full of droppings for the compost pile.

The evening news program brings the government representatives out to the podiums with their daily bulletins. Mathew Hancock, Minister for Health, speaks his coverup nonsense “Maybe the NHS are hoarding gowns and masks which is why there is a shortage.” Priti Patel, the Home Secretary says, as one does when knowing there is a need for an apology but not ready to give ground, “I’m sorry the situation makes you feel that way.” As of this writing 8 national health doctors – all of them UK immigrants – have died. The number of nurses to have died is unknown. Today at over 11,000 deaths, England is set to overtake Italy in the number of Covid-19 deaths.

On Easter Sunday morning, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson was discharged from St. Thomas’s Hospital and driven to Chequers, the country seat of the current Prime Minister. Whatever one feels about this Prime Minister we are grateful that one more life has been saved. And so is he, giving public thanks to the nurses who cared for him; particularly Ward Sister Jenny McGee, from New Zealand and Staff Nurse Luis Pitarma from Portugal – again – immigrants.

Easter Sunday is when some look for a miracle. Not necessarily the one of a life returned, but possibly of the recognition in this moment of gratitude by the Prime Minister, for the nurses, doctors and all staff working in the health service. Doctors may cure but it is the nurses and hospital staff that keep us alive.

A strange part of all of this is trying to accept that my job is to be out of the way, not on the ‘front line’ – not helping. But what to do? what is next? The table napkins are next, the first one already torn and sewn to make a face mask. I take up a needle and mother’s cotton threads while listening to history unfold itself again.

I bow my head over the work as a gentlewoman would in the Tudor time of King Henry and his Lord Privy Seal, Sir Thomas Cromwell.

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

Muriel Murch

One Memory Leads to Another

Easter Weekend 2020