A message from Jonty Driver

I’d like to encourage members of the WLS to read at least one of Sam Harvey’s novels. There is a website: www.samanthaharvey.com   There is something about her in Wikipedia.  The novels are:  The Wilderness (2010), All is Song (2013), Dear Thief (2015). I see there is a novella called Bounty Hunter, 2015;  I don’t know about that

Introduction to our February talk, by our speaker, Barnaby Phillips

I'm a broadcaster and writer. I was born in the UK, raised in Kenya and Switzerland, and studied History at Oxford, with a Masters in African Politics and Geography from London.

I worked for the BBC from 1991-2006. During this time I was a producer at the BBC World Service, and freelance reporter ('stringer') in Mozambique (1993-4) and Angola (1997). Later I became a BBC Correspondent in Nigeria (1998-2001) and Southern Africa (2001-2006). During this time I travelled and reported from countries across Africa. I speak fluent French and Portuguese.

In 2006 I joined the new Al Jazeera English television station, where I'm now a Senior Correspondent. I was based in Athens from 2006-2011, and have been living back in London for the last four years.  With Al Jazeera I've reported from across the world; including Japan, India, Burma, Africa, the Middle East and the United States, although the main focus of my work has been in Europe, recently concentrating on the migration and Eurozone crises. 

My talk

My talk will be will be about a forgotten aspect of the Second World War; how Britain took 100,000 African soldiers to the jungles of Burma to fight against the Japanese. These were the so-called ‘Burma Boys’.  In particular, I will tell the story of Isaac Fadoyebo, who signed up as a 16 year old in rural Nigeria in 1942. He was shipped to India the following year. In March 1944, in Burma, Isaac was horribly injured in a jungle ambush deep behind Japanese lines. His British officers were killed and so were many African colleagues. Too sick to even crawl, Isaac was saved by a family of courageous Burmese rice farmers who hid and fed him for 9 months, before his eventual rescue by the British. Isaac returned to Nigeria in 1945, where he lived a life of respectable obscurity. Many decades later, in his final years, Isaac became my friend in Lagos;  at his urging I went to Burma, carrying a letter of thanks and photographs for the family who'd saved him and of whom he'd been thinking these past seven decades.

Through Isaac’s tale, I will look at the bigger picture. Were these African soldiers volunteers, or were they forced to fight for King and Empire? How were they treated by the British, and how did they fare afterwards? What impact did their experiences have on them and on Independence Struggles after the War? I hope to make your audience think about the Second World War in new and less Eurocentric ways; from the perspective of a Nigerian youth or a Burmese rice farmer it was more a struggle of dying Empires than a heroic stand against fascism.

My book 'Another Man's War: The Story of A Burma Boy in Britain's Forgotten African Army' tells this story. 

Some useful links

For those who are interested in background reading, here are some reviews/articles about the book.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/09/another-mans-war-by-barnaby-phillips-review/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11093145/Another-Mans-War-by-Barnaby-Phillips-review-profoundly-moving.html

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/16/from-nigeria-to-burma-jungle-courage-and-compassion-in-war-with-japan-vj-day

'Another Man's War' was published in late 2014, and was chosen by NPR in the US as 'One of The Best Books of 2014' and by the Daily Telegraph in the UK as 'One of the Best History Books of 2014' . It's now out in paperback and on kindle- Amazon link with reader's reviews is here

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Another-Mans-War-Britains-Forgotten/dp/1780745222/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405695837&sr=1-2&keywords=another+man%27s+war

And for those with a bit more time on their hands- I made an award winning documentary about Isaac Fadoyebo and the Burma Boys in 2011 for Al Jazeera English (a couple of years before I wrote the book).  It's free online, 45 minutes long, and all are welcome to watch 

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeracorrespondent/2011/08/2011828135228487172.html

A couple of other links if people are keen- 

my own website is 

http://barnabyphillips.com/

and if you want to hear an interview with me by Justin Webb on the BBC R4 Today Programme on this story it's here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-29106435

Book and film review, by Hugh Arbuthnott

Sunset Song

By Lewis Grassic Gibbon

“Lewis Grassic Gibbon was born James Leslie Mitchell at the dawn of the twentieth century in 1901 in Aberdeenshire. Spending most of his childhood in Arbuthnott, a farming community in the Mearns, his family and community's tie to the land was to create a love-hate relationship between this area and the writer which lasted until his early death in 1935.”

This passage is taken from the beginning of a BBC article from a series on its website about Scottish writing. It is a good article about the author and in particular about his trilogy A Scots Quair (quair means book) of which Sunset Song is the first volume and thought generally to be the best of the three. It is certainly the most read and was voted Best Scottish Book of All Time at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2006. The other two books are called Cloud Howe and Grey Granite. I should explain here that, in the quote above, the BBC refers  to Aberdeenshire  but in 1901 the area was in Kincardineshire, also known as The Mearns (see the entry for Kincardineshire in Wikipedia).

The story of Sunset Song is of a girl called Chris Guthrie who was born and brought up on the fictional farming estate of Kinraddie, which presumably is loosely based on the Arbuthnott estate and Arbuthnott village where Mitchell first went to school. Life is hard for the tenant farmers and Chris grows up in a community whose farms are frequently hit by disasters, natural or man-made. Her father is a hard man, a patriarch who orders his family about and beats his son for disobeying him while reducing his wife to a “breeding sow” who commits suicide by poisoning herself and her most recent twin babies when she finds she is pregnant again.

When her father dies, Chris marries a local boy, Ewan Taverner, has a baby and faming life continues until the outbreak of war in 1914 when Ewan joins the army. Before going to France, he returns from his training camp, drunk, belligerent and demanding.  Chris is appalled and turns her back on him when he departs at the end of his leave. The next news she has of him is that he has been killed in France but it turns out that he has been shot for desertion – seeking to escape back to the Mearns and the smells of the countryside he knew so well – and perhaps to Chris also. 

The book is written in a version of the Kincardineshire dialect, with some of the spelling changed to make it easier to understand by any English-speaker. The prose is breathless and poetic. The most important message in the book is that everything changes except the land and the seasons. The film, directed by Terence Davies, has tried to capture all these qualities, although he hasn’t tried to force all the actors to stick closely to the dialect.  There are some superb shots of the countryside but it isn’t clear whether it is indeed Kincardineshire or New Zealand where some of the filming took place. This allowed the director to film the farming folk tripping far too often through ripe, waving corn (about which no farmer would have been at all happy) although it was winter in Britain when filming was under way. Parts were also filmed  in Luxembourg, perhaps because some of the financing, which Davies found it difficult to get together, came from the Luxembourg Film Fund. The film lasts for two and a quarter hours which is too long; the director often indulged himself in long, lingering shots of fields, forests and views of interiors. He has here indeed been faithful to the book but somehow the written descriptions are more readable than the film’s meanderings are watchable. Where he was less true to the book, I felt, was in a sequence showing Ewan’s last hours before he is taken out and shot, an episode which is given far more prominence than in the book; perhaps Davies wanted to show how horrific he found the shooting of deserters in WWI, while the author’s treatment of the episode implies that Ewan should have expected nothing else.

The acting was good. Agyness Deyn, a former model who is a relative newcomer to films, played Chris Guthrie and very well. Peter Mullan is her father and although some of the reviews I have read say he plays a stereotype of other recent roles he has had, we hadn’t seen him before and thought he got it right.

Vanessa and I were glad to have seen the film. Of course, this was partly for personal reasons but also because it is a book which I have long admired. If you are ever up in that part of the world, it is worth visiting the Lewis Grassic Gibbon Centre in Arbuthnott village to learn more about the author and the locality. The village is just south of Stonehaven, between Aberdeen and Montrose.

Hugh Arbuthnott

3 Jan 2016

Gratitude by Oliver Sachs 45pp, £9.99 (£4.72 Kindle) Book review by Lawrence Youlten

Oliver Sachs died a few months ago, and this short book comprises four short essays on the themes of mortality and how to assess the contribution of one’s life to the world one is shortly to leave. I have long been a fan of Sachs’s books. He was born in 1933, so is one of my generation, and though we never met, we lived in the same area of North London in our formative years. He was a practising physician in New York until shortly before his death.  He is a wonderfully clear and entertaining writer. Probably his best-known books are “The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat” and “Awakenings”. The latter was made into an award-winning feature film starring Robin Williams and Robert de Niro. Both deal with his work as a neurologist, both as a clinician and a researcher. He has also written an entertaining memoir of his childhood as part of an observant Orthodox Jewish family, “Uncle Tungsten”, and recently a more comprehensive autobiography, “On the Move”.

“Gratitude” is a short book that can easily be read at one sitting, and, as I have already discovered, repays rereading. Of particular interest was his account of how an atheist who has turned his back on his strict religious upbringing makes sense of the world and his place in it. He deals with the sensitive subject of how he broke the news that he was gay to his parents. His mother’s reaction to this seems extraordinary from the perspective of time, but would, I think, have been quite usual in the 1950s. If you have ever wondered how you would cope with the fact of imminent death, you should find a lot of interest and reassurance in “Gratitude”

15 January meeting: Poetry Workshop, by Jonty Driver

Jonty has sent me this summary of his plans for his Poetry Workshop on 15 January:

"We are going to be looking at a number of poems by a variety of hands (some well-known, some not) as a way of thinking about the how of poetry as well as the what: about how poems are made, as an aid to understanding what effect they have on the reader or listener, what they are communicating. Jonty is especially interested in the division of poems into lines (the big distinction between verse and prose) and the balance of lineation and syntax, but he will also direct our attention to rhythm and metre, rhyme and off-rhyme, and stanza-form. He hopes this workshop will be more like a seminar than a lecture.

The poems - or extracts from poems - he will be using as examples will be in an attachment which will be circulated before the meeting;  will those member s of the WLS who have printers please bring a copy to the workshop?  Jonty will print some extra copies."

Winning verse by a member.(Victoria Wood, look to your laurels)

Gillian Southgate has won a prize in the monthly competition in the Oldie (which, incidentally, has improved a lot since Alexander Chancellor took over as Editor).She has kindly allowed me to reproduce it here:

You Always Dance in the Kitchen

You always dance in the kitchen and you twirl like a wild banshee,
You pirouette with a fat courgette as you snack on a mange tout pea,
You swing and shake with a fillet of hake, while the cat stands by aggrieved,
And your palais glide with a beef topside must be seen to be believed.
I come alive when I see you jive past the bowl of kiwi fruit,
That smart foxtrot with the eggs cocotte makes me faint, you look so cute.
You twist and shout round a nice brown trout and a plate of fennel gratin
Your entrechat is way above par when it’s poised over rhubarb tatin.
Your linzertorte as you pull up short in the middle of a tango,
Tastes quite divine, and I know you’re mine when you sashay round a mango.
Oh, you’ve always been my dancing queen; you come on like Pavlova,
(That’s cream and fruit and meringue to boot, and it really rolls me over).

John Davison's talk on Sir Walter Scott, by Gillian Southgate

On December 11^th John Davison gave an insightful talk to the Literary Society on Sir Walter Scott, whose enviable personality seems to have combined rationality, self-control and astuteness, with the ability to love, and to inspire love for himself in others. According to his biographer, he had ‘a wide ranging sympathy for, and a belief in, the human heart.’ Scott’s sympathies for doomed causes, as well as his fierce patriotism, led to novels featuring bold clansmen like Rob Roy, and noble heroes such as Ivanhoe, both made famous, in simplified form, in Boys’ Own literature in the early decades of the twentieth century. These works were hugely popular, featuring as they do dramatic scenes and characters, and revealing something of a loftiness of moral tone. Like Dickens’s, Scott’s characters frequently have whimsical names, or are the missing heirs to a fortune or an aristocratic lineage.  To look at Scott’s soul, John told us, we had only to read the Waverley novels. It wasn’t surprising, then, to discover that on one occasion Scott found himself on the brink of fighting a duel.  It was clearly what one of his heroes might have done.

A lawyer, the Sheriff Deputy for Selkirk, the founder of the Quarterly magazine and the editor of the Scots Ballads, he had a huge and influential circle of friends and admirers, two of whom were the Kings of England and France. His novel Marmion was a bestseller, and the Waverley novels were the most successful in the English language – overlaid, it has to be said, with a Scots dialect that sometimes became tedious for his readers. He was his own best critic, and generous in his praise for those he saw as superior poets – Lord Byron and he, though markedly different in character, liked and respected each other. He was also a close friend of William Wordsworth. Married and settled in his house ‘Abbotsford’, he showed the strength of his character when there was a catastrophic failure of the financial system in 1825, and he lost all his money.

His response to this blow was characteristic.  He wrote his way out of debt. His output was prodigious, and though not of the quality of Marmion and the earlier works, it eventually enabled him to pay off his debts. Eight years later, however, he was dead, and one has to speculate that the energy thrown into this enterprise actually wore him out.  Scott is acknowledged as the founder of the historical novel, and his fame resulted in the Waverley railway station in Edinburgh, and in a memorial monument so large and impressive that it eclipses even Prince Albert’s.  A good friend, an idealist but with a cool nature when he needed to call on it, an acquaintance of the high and mighty, but neither cynical nor pompous, he is famed for having also invented the cult of Scotland - tartan, pithy aphorisms and all.  Scott isn’t read much these days, and John enjoined us all to try him. Most  left the Court Hall resolving to do so. Even to his own most appropriate name, Scott could not have done more to put the character, landscape and culture of his homeland on the map, where it continues to state its case right into our own century.