The late Alan Mckinna

 

 

 As most of you will have heard, Alan, such a central figure in our Society, died suddenly on Saturday evening, 12 December. Many members will have memories of Alan that they'd like to share, and the first of these appear below. Please add your own contributions by e-mailing them to lyoulten@aol.com Thanks to David Page for the picture above. Others, preferably as .JPG files, would be welcome. Alan's daughter Fiona has asked me to thank the Society's members for their support.

from HilaryRoome:

Always exceptionally kind, generous and supportive, Alan was for many years the President of Literary Society and was an enthusiastic participant.  He will be greatly missed.

from Pam Buxton:

I would just like to add my voice to the tributes to Alan. He was one of the kindest men I have ever met. So thoughtful, so caring and so observant. Winchelsea will be a lonelier place without him

 from Ann Dawson:

There are so many memories of Alan that one could mention but there is one I will never forget.  One evening, when my husband Michael was nearing the end of his long battle with cancer, I had to go out for a short time leaving him in the care of my daughter Caroline.  On my return I was surprised to be greeted by gales of laughter from upstairs where I found Alan, the much respected and eminent consultant from the Marsden Hospital, with his sleeves rolled up struggling, with Caroline, to instal and activate a special mattress, the arrival of which had coincided with Alan’s visit.  Michael was sitting in a chair in fresh pyjamas and Alan insisted on going on to make the bed, departing with a bundle of sheets to put in his washing machine.  A true friend indeed.

from William Doherty:

 Every life has many facets and in most instances we are only familiar with a few, which inevitably gives an incomplete picture in any attempt at memorialising but some people inspire us to try The American poet and writer advised us  

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."   

I believe she had in mind the revelatory slip, (think Boris Johnson’s recent Scottish Devolution’s a disaster and the attempts to row back from it which could most charitably be described as unconvincing).  It was different with Alan who unobtrusively showed us  a succession of admirable qualities; loyalty – to family, church, professional vocation,  community down to clubs and societies; reliability,  an unfailing courtesy, that quiet sense of service which saw him delivering supplementary background information to interested members of his Book Group after he presented his last choice  On Chapel Sands   and the self-effacing generosity that had two bottles of wine appearing  unheralded on the table at our medical lunches 

My younger self would never have imagined me having a role model at my age and stage but Alan provided it – the Christian life, well lived.  

from Howard Norton:

 When I introduced Alan at my ‘With Great Pleasure’ session last Friday, I called him ‘The Grand Old Man’ of the Literary Society.  That description was sincerely meant and so well deserved.  He was a Founder Member of the Society and the most loyal of supporters over many years.  I am not even sure that the Society would have survived, let alone flourished, without his enthusiastic commitment.  I always sensed that, although Alan was involved with almost every aspect of Winchelsea life, the Literary Society was closest to his heart.  As secretary for many years, he was so good at affirming other people’s contributions and modest in downplaying his own.  His financial generosity was proverbial; few people knew that for several years he subsidised the Society by providing our wine. 

 Alan emailed me on Saturday morning to thank me for asking him to read - he was always so gracious in that regard.  (On the rare occasions when he couldn’t attend a meeting he would never fail to send his apologies.)  He went on to say how sorry he was  that a couple, long associated with the society, were not able to join in because they couldn’t Zoom.  How typical of Alan that, in the last hours of his life, he should be concerned for others.

His death leaves a void which can never be filled but also a deep gratitude that we were privileged to share his company for so long.

 from Ann & Jonty Driver:

We were shocked to hear of the death of Alan McKinna, especially so soon after we had heard him reading splendidly from Alan Bennet at our latest Zoomed meeting of Howard Norton's "With Great Pleasure" only a few days ago. We shall miss greatly his generous and wise presence in our meetings and social gatherings. Alan was widely cultured ; this was apparent from his own "WGP" session last year. We remember too his contribution to the discussion of John Davison’s talk about Walter Scott. After that talk, Alan decided he wanted to send John a gift to show his personal appreciation.  This was something he insisted he would do on his own, outside the WLS. It seemed to us typical of the man.

One often hears people saying that a sudden death must be a kind of blessing.  Oddly enough, The Book of Common Prayer specifically prays that one shouldn’t have to suffer a sudden death, we guess so one may have time to confess one’s sins and so go to judgement shriven of sin. Somehow we doubt Alan was much laden with sin;  he always seemed to us the epitome of goodness, not just a clever man, but kindness embodied, caring quietly for Mal and for any others who needed his help. One knew he had faced some immense difficulties in his personal life these last few years;  but he never complained, just got on with caring for other people. We shall miss him but are very glad we knew him.

from Jan Ziff:

 

I can hardly begin to express the deep sorrow I feel knowing that the wonderful, kind, loving, humorous, warm and always welcoming Alan is no longer among us.

 

Anon:

Alan McKinna is a loss.   A force for good and, I believe, distinguished in his calling.

from Richard and Catherine Thomas:

We will always remember Alan as an exceptionally friendly and kind person, and almost alarmingly erudite, as he seemed to have read more or less the whole of English literature, and then, astonishingly, to be able to recall it all.  His devotion to Mal shone through everything that he did in these last few years as her illness deepened.  We often bumped into each other doing our morning shopping, and when I asked how things were going he invariably emphasised the positives – that at least they still had each other and could see the funny side of their situation, and were determined to go on doing so. 

At least for Alan has been spared much of the grimness of old age.  He died on his way to a concert which no doubt he was looking forward to, having spent the previous evening doing one of the things he most enjoyed and did best.

from Ann Rachlin:

 How can I sum up all that Alan McKinna meant to us in a few short sentences?    This was a man whose warmth and friendship beamed out from him like the golden rays of the sun drawn by a child.   Alan greeted everyone, friend, acquaintance and stranger with that lovely smile that put you instantly at ease and a twinkle in his eye that told you that he was a friend.

You could talk about anything to Alan and he would listen, comment, sometimes with humour and sometimes with a wry smile that meant he did not totally agree.

He was a man of compassion, always kind, always considerate and understanding.   When he retired as a doctor, he continued healing with his generosity of spirit and unfailing support whenever he could see that we would benefit from his professional knowledge.   He was never too busy to listen and always there, if not in person, at the other end of a phone or email.

Alan had humour in abundance.   Throughout this stressful year, where would we have been without his emails and his links to something funny, something serious but important, always something to warm the heart of his friends?

 When it comes to caring for the frailty of old age, there can be no finer example of “in sickness and in health till death do us part”.   His devotion to Mal, his seemingly inexhaustible patience and his obvious love for his life partner, was typical of his generosity of spirit.  For those of us who know and understand, he is a role model but a hard act to follow.

A stalwart of the Winchelsea community, to say that Alan McKinna will be missed has to be the understatement of the century.  He was always there, supporting in every way possible, all in spite of his own constant pain and fatigue.

Alan, we will miss you.   We think of your gentlemanly greetings at the Church Market.  I see you now with your shopping bag of goodies, never failing to come and greet us at the piano where Iain was playing.   No Jewish religious holiday went by without an appropriate card and greeting from Alan.   A word of support in troubled times - a friendly enquiry and, during this pandemic year, even an offer to do some shopping for us! 

 Oh yes, Iain and I will miss  Alan McKinna for he enriched our lives.   We will remember him forever with love.

 

from Cheryl and Guy Fraser-Sampson :

 Our earliest memory of Alan was when he visited us after Guy's talk to the Literary Society on golden age crime fiction to thank Guy for an entertaining evening.  As newcomers to Winchelsea, that meant a lot and it was so typical of what a kind and thoughtful human being he was.  We shall miss his gentle humour and friendly face.'.

 from Alfred and Caroline McKenney:

 Alfred: Alan was one of those people who, although an acquaintance felt a friend.  To me this was wonderful. A combination of thoughtfulness and puckish humour led him some years ago to give us an ancient tourist guide he had located called “Here’s England” written by a certain Ruth McKenney. Perhaps he had identified that I might benefit from a few cultural pointers.

Caroline: Alan had a sincerity about him that graced the town. Alan’s enquiring mind would quicken when discussing the natural world; its wonder seemed to increasingly reveal itself to him. A man of much compassion, he will be greatly missed.

 

 

 

 

A Winter's Day at Westonbirt & other poems, by CJ (Jonty) Driver (reviewed by Gillian Southgate)

 

The  focus of the title poem in this collection are the trees at Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire, which is viewed as a microcosm of England in 2020.  The poem contrasts the nineteenth century arboretum with the country as it now stands, poised to undertake new direction and growth, but still subject to political buffeting. Different facets of national identity are reflected in the diversity of the trees; ‘some stubborn, strong and awkward,’, some ‘apt to spiral out of shape.’ Each tree is catalogued, each is compatible in the context of a small English park. Like the country, some trees are vulnerable, but there’s a note of optimism about the future; the oak tree referred to in stanza one is fenced in, ‘as if it knew by now how not to fall’.

The poet encounters on a path a group of children who ‘make no attempt to fraternise’, but the trees go on growing together, indifferent to human insularity. In political terms, ‘we’ve circled round the paths and find ourselves precisely where we were before.’ But these lines are also a metaphor for our never having learned the lessons of mutual dependency, something the trees have long both known and benefited from.

The second stanza begins: ‘So, think about this place in England now’. An England, the poem affirms, ‘hemmed in with silly rules…. but passionately free.’ The final line acknowledges that no-one knows where we are going next. This is true of our personal, as well as our political future. The only certainty, the collection will reveal, is the fact of death, which topples nations, people, even trees in the course of the years.

There are nine more poems in the group. The garden theme continues in ‘Old Oak’ where the last line signals that the tree of life is in time cut down for us all. By contrast, ‘In a French Garden’ life itself is seen as flagrantly alive in the troupe of hoopoes with ‘panaches furled, then flared’. ‘Last Lesson’ is a tender, regretful poem in which the poem’s retired schoolteacher comes to understand the human urge to shape and force into conformity the teeming natural life around us. In old age, her judgements have softened, disappearing ‘like end of season daffodils’ and she laments not having left well alone, and allowed her plants and pupils to flourish.

The rhymed poem ‘Song of the Sparrows’ is elegiac, the writer accepting the threat of death in a plague year, even in the face of sparrows busily occupied in preparing for their next generation. Similarly, the poem ‘In the Lodi Garden’, fixes the readers’ eye on  vibrant images of a public place in New Delhi, but there is a dying fall in the last quatrain, sibilant sounds and the symmetry of organisation expressing the sacred nature of life ‘gathered in a garden.’

The final poem is a haiku.  The poet views, in full summer, a tumbled wisteria wearing the white of snowfall, a reminder of winter, and of the passing of time.

The coherence in the collection is in the themes of nature, enduringly alive, and the mind of man, who knows his days are numbered. From the general we move gradually to the particular, the white wisteria bearing within its blossoms the seeds of death. The poetry is enhanced by Jonty Driver’s delicate paintings employing a tree motif which ages with the seasons. It’s a fine collection, encompassing abundant life, transience, inevitability, and acceptance.

 

(This poetry pamphlet is, as with Jonty's other recent publications, reviewed below, available through Artwrite in Rye (Website artwrite.co,uk)

 

Mid life: Views and Poetics: talk by Nii Ayikwei Parkes, 20 November 2020

 The Lit. Soc. assembled in their now customary cyberspace huddle to hear from Nii Ayikwei Parkes whom pre-match billing had presented as a true Renaissance Man – novelist, poet, publisher, embodying the distinct cultures of Britain and Ghana and trailing clouds of glory from a fistful of glittering, international literary prizes.  Our 46 year old guest had chosen to address the topic of midlife, offering his views and analysing its effect on his work through some of the elements of Aristotle’s Poetics. 

Significantly divorcing it from its loyal attendant crisis, Parkes offered a thoughtful view from his own experience of midlife.  He saw it as the start of his life after the watershed of his children growing up and reinforced the notion of transition by commenting that although the ingredients of his life – work, reading, writing – remained the same, somehow the finished dish tasted different.  He quoted the example of Brazilian and Cuban cooking where identical ingredients yielded markedly different end products. 

Nii displayed his abilities as a performance poet with readings from Aminatta Forna’s Happiness  and the St. Lucian, Sir Derek Walcott’s The Bounty, using the latter as a platform to introduce the analytical elements of Poetics.  To illustrate the concept of shapeshifting in this Caribbean setting, he used the transformative role of the tide in the metamorphosis of a reef to a series of small islands.  Shapeshifting of  familial roles altered the nature of  his own  literary output, notably fatherhood and then  losing his own father.  He corroborated this with readings from The Making of You  and Caress from his poetry collection The Geez, both readings linked by a gardening theme.  Fatherhood also shifted his interpretation of actions having him now always  seeking the purpose or motive behind them.   

Employing the workshop approach, our guest solicited questions from the audience which demonstrated their intent to trap that elusive wraith, creativity.  Nii confessed that his ideas germinated from random seeds borne on the wind, overheard snatches of conversation, trawling bursts of song from the depths of memory, similes conjured from subconscious associations, exploiting the altered language and geography that were the legacy of a dual national heritage.  These struck the creative spark that fired the imagination to write the plot or mythos and summon the characters (ethos).        

Pressed on the difference between writing Prose and Poetry, Nii likened the former to building a house and the latter to decorating it.  As the simile implies, prose needs more stamina and self-belief requiring a leap of faith to start the process and the conviction that you would see it through    The plot forms round the kernel of your preliminary ideas and about half way through you achieve critical mass and sufficient momentum and self confidence to carry you through to the end.  Intermittent reading aloud (lexis) helped sustain the creative impulse and Parkes likened the acquisition of that critical, creative momentum to driving as a teenager during a severe petrol shortage where opportunities to freewheel on long descents were seized with an exultant alacrity.  A different Muse fostered Poetry in a more seductive process whose origins lay in feelings rather than ideas.  Music or melos could be influential donating an evocative phrase from the lyrics of a song or altering interpretation; a butcher – of what, livestock or men?  The ability to draw from  the wellsprings of both English and West African cultures was an asset.  There was no conflict and the range of different tongues widened his linguistic vocabulary. 

The Lit. Soc. had enjoyed a stimulating and thought provoking evening delivered in a novel format and as one audience member observed lockdown’s deprivations  had made space for Nii’s material – thereby obviating the need for preliminary catharsis, Aristotelian or otherwise.  Whew!       

By William Doherty  

 

COOKING FOR ONE by Gillian Southgate

First thing: turn your computer off. You’ve worked since six a.m.

You’re absolutely starving, and you’re on your own, pro tem.

So dig a fat white onion out, and dice it very fine,

Add two crushed cloves of garlic and a glass of good red wine,

Then put in oregano, thyme, and sugar (just a tad)

A tin of chopped tomatoes, and the best mince to be had.

If you like, throw in some pepper, broken mushrooms, what you will,

Some fennel, even, but leave out the stronger herbs, like dill.

Cook all of this down slowly on an even, gentle heat,

And you’ll end up with a pasta sauce that’s pretty hard to beat.

At this point, pour yourself another glass of something red,

Boil up spaghetti in a pan, or penne shapes instead,

Add just a little oil so that the pasta moves about,

Then drain, supply a shallow bowl, and spoon the supper out.

Italian food is just the thing to cook if you’re on furlough,

A dish for one, and perfect with another glass of Merlot.

 

(This poem was the winning entry in a recent Literary Competition in The Oldie)

 

 

 

The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping Samantha Harvey (Zoom Meeting 23 October 2020)

The Lit. Soc. delighted once again in welcoming Samantha Harvey, albeit on this occasion as a Zoom mediated apparition, who elucidated the process which yielded her latest book  The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. She mapped the battlefield of her years-long struggle with insomnia, explaining how this generated a tortured creative process resulting in her  latest  book, which veered dramatically away from the course set by her earlier works.  

She opened with the first of several  readings from Shapeless Unease and detailed her encounter with unsolicited, nocturnal wakefulness and revealed how intimidating the prospect of “the yawning expanse of a night awake” was.   Linking Sleep and Death, a recurring pairing through the talk, she confessed how in the restless throes of insomnia she was haunted by an image of herself as the reluctant centrepiece of groups assembled in medieval death-bed scenes. The evening started to assume the form of a case presentation by some late Victorian medical luminary theatrically unveiling a patient’s inner torments to an audience of medical students, junior doctors and speculative, intelligent laymen. On this occasion the normal denoument in which the professor, exuding Olympian detachment and an assured serenity, pulls the rabbit of  diagnosis from his top hat and moves on to the morale boosting topic of treatment failed to materialise and Samantha remained mentally embattled.

In the absence of a treatable cause and a therapeutic silver bullet, Samantha’s intractable guerrilla war with insomnia dragged on, draining but devoid of any dramatic focus or likely resolution. It might have started with domestic anxieties but precise recollection was proving difficult. GP consultations resulted in a strained relationship and a refractory malaise. Discussions with a Christian friend and scrutinising her situation through the prism of religion only increased nervous tension and feelings of vulnerability. Driven in desperation to the wild side, she found cold water swimming – particularly that initial immersion of head and face – produced a transient, pleasing distraction but no cure. Writing in her customary, conventional style proved an unattainable objective; she could not maintain the narrative arc for a novel but found some solace  in an intimate, self - searching  approach. Her output was fragmented; some of the shards identified with an indigenous Amazonian tribe, others managed to embed a complete and  coherent short story in the body of her text while the rest were elements from her autobiography. She became absorbed by the nature and structure of this new work and the possible well springs of her new Muse – a distillation of  multiple conversations with herself, a veiled truth- telling exercise?  Was all this mental thrashing about sucking her down into psychological quicksand – denied dreams now; had writing become a way to process her subconscious?  Uninvited images from these wakeful vigils were incorporated into her text.  Startling conclusions ricocheted round her cranial vault; the mind was a prison, love was the escape of the self from the self and could proliferate.  She found she wrote easily, writing  “helped”;  this last book completed in 4 months as against her previous average of 2-3 years   

The memoir of this  anguished internal reflection was coaxed from her by her publisher with a view to printing it as a magazine article but the plan was  changed to marketing it as a book. But what had she written?  Self-indulgence?  Self-help?  Female auto – fiction? Psycho-masochistic trauma porn?  Where were the boundaries these days between fiction and non-fiction?  Whatever others say, Harvey is convinced the book is genuine and is prepared to stand by it. 

The audience almost palpably ached for a happy ending – the serial long dark nights of the soul would end and Joy would "cometh in the morning".  Reality was more prosaic; Samantha remained a martyr to insomnia but could  manage it and her expectations better. She quotes from Macbeth and reveals she knows what she is missing   

……….the innocent sleep

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast.        

Resignation has proven a sturdy carapace – others’ judgement of her work intrigues rather than enrages, she accepts she cannot control the book’s journey post-publication,  politics is viewed with detached equanimity even if alloyed with disappointment. 

A lively Q&A session indicated that the Winchelsea audience was fully engaged with this highly original foray into experimental writing. 

William Doherty