Remembering the First Time

August 10, 2024 / aggiemurch / 1 Comment

Written and produced for you by Muriel Murch with WSM by my side

It was 1948 and I was 5 years old when, with my mother and Brett, my nanny, I stood on the side of The Devil’s Punch Bowl. As each horse came to the crest of the gully, they paused, taking in the drop, collecting three strides down, before a leap over the solid tree-trunk above the deep ditch then galloping up the other side and away onto the rest of the course. As a big grey horse thundered past, my mother and Brett let out a cheer for the Swedish rider. Brett was from Sweden and this was the first Olympics after the Second World War. The equestrian events at the 1948 London Olympic Games were all held close to home at the Tweseldown Racecourse by Aldershot – a military town and at a very early age we were taught, “Never talk to the soldiers”. The American team won the eventing, the Swedish team placed second, with Mexico taking the Bronze medal. The changes in the political geography of countries can often be seen at the Olympics. In those days Mexico and Argentina sent successful equestrian teams all over the world. I never got over the thrill of seeming that grey horse leap into and over the Devils Punch Bowl.

I was hooked and it would be less than ten years before Taffy and I were galloping through those same forests and over any obstacle I found in the secret freedoms that lay on those moorlands.

We remember those first times, and now as this year’s Olympics play out in Paris we watch the athletes perform, many for the first time for their country.

Sir Keir is a serious man and treating his new premiership with appropriate gravitas, and while the Labour Government was seriously going about getting settled in, they too felt they could breathe gently and watch our athletes in Paris giving their very British best. But if he had hoped for a longer honeymoon period it was soon cut short as we watched the riots break out in a fire storm over the killing of three little girl children finishing a dance class in Southport. An unnamed seventeen year old boy – incorrectly rumored at first to be a Muslim refugee – is being held in custody. Rumours – spreading as fast as the wildfires of Canada and California, have sparked violence in cities across the country. Far-Right nationalists fuelled by the disinformation from social media, are following a pattern discernible in North America, Israel and Hungary, among other eruptions around the world. Gray headed grannies holding signs for ‘Nans not Nazis’ are in danger of being knocked to the ground by the boys in thier street that they may have helped raise.

Far right rioters attack asylum seeker hotels in Tamworth. Photo for Al Jazeera

From Southport in the north to Aldershot in the south, towns up and down the country that hold deep pockets of poverty and unemployment are fuelled with anger and rioting in an all-too-familiar manner. Sir Keir Starmer is facing his first time as Prime Minister with this storm battle and our country’s worst elements. Nigel Farage barely makes an effort to keep a neutral face while he sits in Parliament and no one can believe that he is not chalking one up for the far-right team. The Police have been given ‘extra powers’, more prosecuting lawyers have been called in, though from where and where to it is hard to tell. ‘The rioters will feel the full force of the law,’ promises Sir Keir, but some of us wonder if those said rioters will care, and what the law stands for – for them and for us all. It just took one incident – no matter that misinformation was spread – lines are drawn across the streets of neighbors, with those leaving flowers for the children and their families, and those rioting for an England they never knew, each side is screaming to be heard.

Certainly other government leaders are not concerned about the internal laws of their own country or the international laws that loosely hold the global community together. The recent swap of Political prisoners, brokered by Germany, Norway, Slovenia, Poland, North America, and Russia that took place in Turkey was the largest game of checkers since the Cold War. 16 Russian dissidents, Germans and US prisoners were returned for 8 Russian undercover spies and agents. But there are still hundreds of political prisoners left behind in Russian prisons, and who knows how many Russian prisoners are also still in European and American jails. When the talks first started, Navalny’s name was among those put forward for release, ‘Sure, no problem,’ said Putin in the Russian political way. During the months that the final arrangements fell into place and the talks continued the ‘Sure no problem’ line was repeated, but Navalny died in prison on February 16th. Bait and switch. Check mate. Putin never intended for Navalny to go free.

It was 1992 when at KPFA Pacifica, I was handed ‘Time and Tide’ a new book by Edna O’Brien who was coming to California for an extensive book tour. This was to be my first book interview. As I picked up the book and turned it in my hand, the portrait of a sensual and defiant Edna stared out at me from the back cover. Edna was a woman who – if she took to your husband at a dinner party might – or might not – return him for breakfast. This I knew to be true. ‘Time and Tide’ was not an easy book, even if you were a follower of Edna’s writing. But I understood Nell, her heroine, even as I cringed at all the troubles that beset her through the pages.

Edna O’Brien at that time. Photo from The New Yorker

Edna arrived at the radio station in a fuss. Her plane has been delayed and her luggage was lost. She was as tiny and Irish as I was tall and English but quickly I saw that we were both nervous. Edna upset at the loss of her luggage and the fact that her silver pendant had rubbed a stain on her white jumper. I was terrified of her intellect and sexuality. But as we sat down, locked together in the recording booth, and began to talk, she relaxed, answering my questions with eagerness and generosity and the conversation began to roam as she remarked “Well, Ulysses is difficult isn’t it?” Then we slipped into film as both of us had been knocked sideways with ‘Raise the Red Lantern.’ by Zhang Yimou. It was clear we shared a mutual concern for the plight of young women and that, as well as my thorough preparation, softened Edna and she recommend me for the publishers next author, Susan Sontag. Now Edna has died at the age of 93 after a long illness and I wonder what was the illness that took her away from this world at the beginning of this late summer time. Edna was my first Author Interview and I will never forget her.

Apart from the riots and the Olympics there are the perennial editorial concerns about the decline of wildlife and insects. Our little terrace is less than 150 square feet and is now full of summertime beauty. We get excited when we see the honey, bumble and mason bees, and then a cabbage white butterfly, an orange tiger moth, and a blue dragonfly also come by. Their first arrivals let us know we are doing the right thing on our tiny patch of heaven.

This has been a Letter from A. Broad. Written and read for you by Muriel Murch, and supported by murchstudio.com

A correction from the audio to the text. In the audio I say Stockport when it should be Southport.

January is Gathering Speed

January 14, 2021February 12, 2021 / aggiemurch / 4 Comments

Recorded and Knit together by WSM

What will this week bring for American politics, for England’s Covid vaccination news, and for all of us living in these times?

With Brexit a done deal, opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer is washing his hands of any Brexit redux, leaving the freedom of travel for Europeans and Britons in the hands of the European Union. Sad as it is maybe he is right to let the English people grumble and suffer on with Boris Johnson’s non-deal.

Meanwhile the Covid Vaccine timetable is being rolled out. Health workers are getting vaccinated, the Queen and Prince Philip have been vaccinated, and white-haired seniors can been seen shuffling along in the cold, queuing outside of drafty tents. Minister of the Cabinet, Michael Gove, does admit “Transport for seniors may present a bit of an issue.” All I can think of is bladder control.

The First BioNTech-Pfizer Vaccine given to ninety-year-old grandmother Margaret Keenan. Photo by Jacob King

The stillness is beginning to get oppressive. Though there are still clusters of young people milling around the High Street coffee shops, not yet able to give up on the social connection or the metabolic addiction of their cup of Joe. Once again, I write out a grocery list and send it along to Parkway Greens. Later in the day, there is a rat-a-tat-tat on the door, and an overflowing box of fruit and vegetables is laid on the steps.

In Hampshire, where I grew up, the statistics are set out in graphs so color-coordinated I can’t follow them. But next door, Surrey, the homiest of home counties, has begun to build temporary morgues on discrete army grounds. While making room for 800 bodies, the County Council are still concerned that this will not be enough. The small hamlets and villages that surrounded my childhood are dotted with Covid virus cases and death. Old names – Ash Vale, Frimley, Bagshot, Camberley, Farnham, Elstead, Tongham, and Guildford, all a part of my childhood – are now saddened with a startled grief. The home counties suburbs are struggling in their perceived privilege with its lack of discipline as much as the industrial working north is with making a lively-hood.

A friend in London admits to now watching afternoon television. Something she would never have considered even six months ago. We are not there yet except for the momentous events of last Wednesday in Washington DC. But the death this autumn of Dame Barbara Windsor, star of the long-running TV drama East Enders reminded us of the hunger to escape into a fantasy world. And, often I do switch on my Roberts radio, tuned to BBC Radio 4, and catch the fifteen minutes of ‘The Archers’ which this year turned 70. First subtitled ‘The Every Day Story of Country Folk’ with a five-part pilot in 1950, it was created in an effort to educate farmers and improve agricultural production in the early post-war years and had a heavy government influence in the scripting until the 1970s. I can remember it playing on the wireless in my nursery where I would be having supper and someone would be ironing. Our generation listened to it for years, it was as ingrained in our minds as a Catholic catechism. School term times came and went, and whenever we returned ‘The Archers’ would be playing in their 6.45. p.m. slot. You could dip in and out of the village story, for it never lost its charm or its relevance to rural living. Even when television came nipping at radio audiences with their soap operas of Coronation Street and The East Enders that focused on working lives in London and the north of England, The Archers carried on.

Over this summer, the episodes of The Archers continued with a story of three British-born young men kept as slaves in a secret location on the outskirts of Ambridge, each one having a learning or mental health disability. This is the appalling reality that The Archers’ editor, Jeremy Howe, chose to confront as well as to challenge. According to the Global Slavery Index, it is thought there are up to 136,000 victims of modern slavery in the United Kingdom.

“It’s not simply a problem involving immigrant labour,” explains Howe. “It can be a British problem involving British slaves and British gang-masters.”

Reading the Saturday Financial Times paper on Sunday, I found a small article tucked in a lower corner. The South Korean Government knocking on Japan’s door once more for recompense for the Korean Comfort Women kept for the Japanese soldiers during WWII. The Japanese are, naturally, dismissing any further claims of compensation for the now very few women left alive. I first came to this story with Nora Okja Keller’s book “Comfort Woman” published in 1998 when for KPFA and KWMR we had a conversation about her book which was loosely told from her grandmother’s remembrances.

Slavery, and enforced indenture-hood, in today’s world, is nothing new, but something we don’t always look to find on our doorstep. Simple dramas like The Archers can do that for us. And so can the three young men of undetermined Slavik European lineage who “worked” for what we now call our Irish Rogue Roofers in 2016. We were taken for a right royal ride and I can only shake my head at our stupidity. And I remember those young men who devoured all the food I fed them and spent the longest time relishing hot water as they cleaned up at the end of the day in our bathroom. Photographs and recordings given to the police yielded nothing more than a night-time stop-over in a local police station for the family patriarch. In the silence of these restricted and cold winter months, with no work available, I pray that those young men are somewhere safe today.

This has been a Letter from A. Broad.

Written and read for you by Muriel Murch

First aired on Swimming Upstream – KWMR.org.

Web support by murchstudio.com

Mad with Grief

September 2, 2020February 12, 2021 / aggiemurch / 1 Comment

Recorded and Knit together by WSM

The sun was shining when we took our Sunday walk. The Broadwalk was full of families not able to leave the city for the long weekend and we are among the few who are still wearing masks. Walking along the grass, underneath the row of now toast-crisp leaved chestnut trees, is a grey haired man. He has a cane in one hand, a plastic bag in the other and he is shouting. At first it seems that he is shouting at the grass or the trees, but he is shouting at a little dog. The dog is very busy, trotting along the paved Broadwalk, clearly ignoring the man who is now waving his cane and the plastic bag. The dog is a little mix with a black body and stubby brown legs. She, it must be a she, wears a pink studded collar and holds her head high as she trots about, sniffing this, and exploring that. We slow down beside the man, and the little dog trots towards me. I bend down and stroke her fur which is soft under my hand. Because she has stopped by me the man comes over and continues to talk in a stream of words.

“I’m older than you, I’m 81. How old are you?” I tell him and we laugh.
“Yes you are older than us.” And then he continues, “My girlfriend died two weeks ago.” And in an instant a picture unfolds for me. She died and now he must care for the dog as maybe his girlfriend cared for him. The dog is not too happy with this arrangement. Today it looks as if the coronavirus, loneliness, death and the days ahead are all too much for him. Are they both, the man and the dog, searching for her in the park? If he holds the dog close to him can she give his days purpose and his nights comfort?

I could not help but reach out and touch his arm though we immediately knew that was forbidden and I withdrew my hand. But in his eyes I read despair and realized he was probably at this moment in time, in the park, going mad with grief.

As we all are trying not to. The pains of India, Syria and Lebanon are pushed off of the news pages. Belarus and the disunited States of America hold our attention in equal measure.

Week four in Belarus shows protesters coming out in greater numbers onto the streets of Minsk. Even the middle class have had enough of the government’s bullying. President Lukashenko strides out alone, masked, in police uniform and carrying a machine gun. His riot police are thick on the ground. But the lion is stirring from his sleep in Moscow. According to the BBC’s Steve Rosenburg, President Putin says he has formed a police reserve unit which won’t be used until the situation gets out of control. Seventeen journalists, mostly from Belarus, reporting to the outside world have had their accreditation removed.

We look in horror and shame at America with the killings, protests and police activities in the news. It is as if the Coronavirus has become an annoying distraction to the business of the next elections in November. And Melania’s speech-giving military uniform followed by the Teddy-boy fuchsia and line-green gowns for the Republican Convention were chilling. It takes very little imagination to understand their meaning.

In England this week children and teachers are to return to their schools. Numbers must have been crunched somewhere and somebody knows what the effects of pouring children onto public transport and then into the schools will be, but nobody is telling the teachers, parents or students.

The weekend’s Financial Times carried an obituary – for Mercedes Barcha. Known as ‘La Gaba’ she was married to Gabriel Garcia Márquez for 56 years. On Márquez’s death in 2014 she was described as being ‘serine and tranquil, dressed in the blouse and shoes of a Tigress, holding a cigarette and a glass of white Tequila, as she took phone calls from world leaders paying their respects’. “Thank you.” She said. I missed reading ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ along with other works by Márquez. It was not until ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ came my way for KPFA, Pacifica that I picked up my first Márquez and fell deeply into his world. Maybe now, in our own time of Covid, I can return to him.

The passing of ‘La Gaba’ pulled at my heart strings, and took me back to our trip to Cuba, in 1989. That year the Russia’s president, Mikhail Gorbachev, announced there would be no more Russian funding for Cuba. The news colored many of the conversations during our weeks at the film school. Our last day ended with a lingering lunch in Havana put together by the film school director Ricardo. Seated at the table were Gabriel Márquez and La Gaba, Thomas Alea and his wife, Julio Garcia Esponso and his wife, Walter and I, and Ricardo. There was lobster, there was wine, sunshine and deep conversation. The men needed little interpretations from Ricardo and, as wives, we spoke quickly, with laughter, together. After lunch we were to board a plane. Gabriel was due at a wedding, but with the discretion of Ricardo both the plane and the wedding would wait for us. Luncheon ended in a solitary walk with Gabriel that has stayed forever in my memory. Now as I think of La Gaba, I raise my glass in salute to her in joining Gabriel wherever that might be.

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