Whitehaven 3: Wastwater

Tony takes me and his son Philip to Wast Water (or Wastwater). The language echoes are powerful: Vast water, waste water, was water, washed water...

It is misty, with a trace of har, that fine wet mist that doesn't feel like rain, not quite, but you end up wet all the same. Wastwater is the deepest lake in the region. A man dropped the body of his wife into it, carefully wrapped, and it took thirty years to find her - what is more, in a rather well-preserved condition. It is very deep.

On the far side from where we stand, that is at the low shore at the right of this photograph, rises the sheer jagged face of slate cliff you see on the left, a grey collapse into silence out of the mist shrouded jags or teeth at the top. I would not call it beautiful. I would say it is better than beautiful. It is forbidding and gaunt and friendless. Are there fish here? Some say no. Tony says he comes here when he is troubled and he forgets his trouble.

Maybe the sheer mercilessness of the view on a day like that eclipses any trouble we might have.

Later we are in a cafe talking about poetry. He says it is about emotion and putting thoughts into words. I tell him poetry is like the water between the low shore and the cliff. It doesn't explain anything. It is something, not the explanation of it. You know that like the valley, the lake and the cliff it is a product of some form of glaciation, but that knowing it is so is not the same as the experience of the lake. The experience of the lake is being in the lake. Or imagining being in the lake. The lake is language and it stands between us and the cliff. It is cold and forbidding but we have to move in by way of the imagination because it overwhelms and moves us. Wastwater is a poetic experience. It is not the Picturesque, not the Sublime: it is nothing fancy. It is not a literary category. It is the poetry we all know and understand instinctively. To read poetry is not to parse it or analyse it, though we do parse and analyse because we must, because we have parsing and analysing brains; poetry is the water that laps in our guts. Poets work with that water. You understand poems by immersing yourself in them. Language and imagination are the water. Understand that - and anybody can understand it because anybody can stand by Wasswater and feel the water and the cliff - and you are on the way to understanding poetry. You dip your toe in and feel. You parse and analyse it, you have to do that too, but it is essentially the shock of water we are trying to produce when we write. That shock is always new. For a while at least.

Sir Nicholas Sekers, Oliver Messel. The sea. The coal. The methane. Wastwater. Vast water. Waste water. Washed water. Was water.

Whitehaven 2: Oliver Messel

Messel was one of the leading interior, film, and theatre designers of the thirties and forties, through to the advent of the new realism of John Osborne and the so called concrete-and-barbed-wire school of design suitable for such as Jimmy Porter. Messel's was altogether another world:



The picture shows Oliver Messel and his sister Anne, later Anne Armstrong Jones, mother of Lord Snowdon, who gave the comic impression of Nicholas (Miki / Niki) Seker on the film yesterday.

This is a sketch by Messel for the set of the film 'Suddenly Last Summer'



And this is his design for the Dorchester Hotel:



As may be seen - and as we saw in profusion in the slide lecture conducted by his son Thomas - Messel was of the same line of sensibility as his friend Rex Whistler. I am not sure what the correct name for this style is (Osbert Lancaster will have labelled it) but maybe we could call it Thirties Rococo for now. It is Fancy writ very large, a last minute doomed frivolity - Hungry Thirties Glamour might be another name for it - that the war, or the post-war generation, was to blow away, leaving nothing except some exclusive interiors and a few films. Concrete and barbed wire.

Messel worked like a demon at it, as if it were for ever the last minute of the last hour before the last and greatest party in the world, at a moment when everything had to be lighter, flouncier, dreamier, wealthier, more of a wonderful- wonderful-darling-joke. He adapted materials. He'd have made Versailles out of rawlplugs if he could.

And then there was Society, that was inextricably a part of this, and of which Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones were the last beacons. Not that Society has stopped existing - it just doesn't exist in quite the party-party form it did before before. Instead they are at the clubs out of which London Lite shows them spilling at 3am, with singers, actors and models with names like Pixie.

Sekers had become part of this world. Darling, darling, he would say to Princess Margaret on the phone, you simply must come down to Glyndebourne.... etc. That's according to Snowdon.

And so stands the Rosehill Theatre in sea coal and nuclear fuel station Whitehaven. The cars arrive with their evening gowned and bow-tied patrons, watched - as one photographs currently on show in the local museum shows - by the locals. Rosehill was not to be confused with Glyndebourne, Sekers insisted when asking for public support. His personal contacts came to perform for him at a much lower fee. In one of the letters on display Sekers tells how David Oistrakh has come over for three performances: one in the Royal Albert Hall that he could fill three-times over, and two at Rosehill where he would receive a fraction of the fee. And Pauk and Menuhin and Soderstrom and Break and Gielgud and Grenfell and Rostropovich...

I wondered whether Rosehill had any fanciful connection to Budapest's Rózsadomb (literally Rosehill) district where the rich lived and continue to live, but it had been Rosehill from the beginning of the 19th century. The name will, I suppose, have tickled Nicholas Sekers (Szekeres Miklós?) as well as his Hungarian business partnes Tomi de Gara (Garai Tamás?).

So, it's a puzzle: The Messels, the Sekers, the poor in their Fords, as Belloc wrote, the rich in their Rolls Royces. The Rosehill Theatre opens in 1959, just twelve years after the great 1947 mining disaster. The mines function into the 80s.

Concrete and barbed wire are sometimes salutary. I am, of course, a child of concrete and barbed-wire, not of Versailles, not even of a Versailles constructed out of rawlplugs.

Two more nuclear power stations to be built here in the next five years. There is cross-party support. It will be boom town again, says Lee at the hotel.

From Whitehaven 1

1. Some 1200 miners were killed at Whitehaven's Haig Pit.

Cumbria suffered two major disasters, both in Whitehaven. The Wellington Pit disaster killed 136 men and boys, while the William Pit Disaster in 1947, claimed 104 victims.

Harrowing as these reports may be, they can do little to convey the full misery and suffering. The news that the families bread winner, or winners as was so often the case, had perished, must have only been the beginning of the suffering. The widow's pension of 2 shillings was considered high in 1839, but must have been hard stretched to raise a family. Even "Lame persons doing nothing" received 5 shillings a week in the 1802 payroll for the Howgill Colliery. Even without the frequent accidents, the conditions underground were horrendous. An account of a visit to William Pit in 1814 vividly describes the suffering of the young children and miners at the hands of the coal owners.

The mine extended miles under the sea bed and methane was the danger.

2.Sellafield (aka Windscale) is just a little way down from Whitehaven:

The "Beach Incident"

1983 was the year of the "Beach Discharge Incident" in which high radioactive discharges containing ruthenium and rhodium 106, both beta-emitting isotopes, resulted in the closure of a beach. BNFL received a fine of £10,000 for this discharge.[48] 1983 was also the year in which Yorkshire Television produced a documentary "Windscale: The Nuclear Laundry", which claimed that the low levels of radioactivity that are associated with waste streams from nuclear plants such as Sellafield did pose a non-negligible risk.

As you approach over hill you catch sight of the sea. There is the marina and the beach in the next natural inlet. The sand is greyish from the coal. No-one bathes there.

It is a rather lovely Georgian town in the centre now. Tony R picks me up at Carlisle and in about an hour or so we are there. The old port might well have been a rival to Liverpool, even supplanted Liverpool, at one time. The port authority buildings stand there still mostly converted into accommodation. Back at the time of the American War of Independence in 1778 it was important enough for John Paul Jones to launch an attack on it that failed because of bad tides and mutinous crew. There is a bench in the marina that commemorates it. There is also a Millenium Pavilion, a wave sculpture, gulls, swans, dogs darting into the water, but not much traffic even at 5.30-ish. Not much unemployment here, says Tony, most people on a fairly equal economic footing. Chemical works nearby. All quiet if a bit isolated. And, despite the Tourism Office in the marina, not much tourism either. A lot of boats though gently knocking in the bay.

But I am here to write about the fiftieth anniversary of the Rosehill Theatre, founded by the Hungarian silk-manufacturer and merchant, Sir Nichols Sekers, and its relaunch as a venue for concerts and plays under Richard Elder, the Director. To that end there is a weekend of events, the first of which was on Thursday night, involving a short film about the designer Oliver Messel who worked with Sekers to create the theatre. Anthony Snowdon does a very passable Sekers imitation in it, complete with Hungarian accent and pencil as cigarette holder. I am also dipping into the newly published history of Rosehill.

The world of Sekers and Messel is a million miles from the world of the miners, but here they were together, and here last night were many who remembered Sekers and Messel. It was primarily that world at the event last night. I shall keep reading and see what transpires. Notes to continue. This in haste complete with possible typos.

London and what next

Scoot down to London for a meeting of the Poetry Book Society Board where I am currently the Chair. Two and a half hours down, the same back by train. Read stuff to be read down and more but different stuff to read on the way back.

I am not about to enter one of those mad periods where I am constantly on the move. Tomorrow to Whitehaven, near Penrith in the Lake District, where they are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Rosehill Theatre, founded by a Hungarian emigré, Sir (as he was to become) Nichols Sekers, who worked in fabrics and the fashion industry, and designed by Oliver Messel. My role is to be invited, entertained and then to sit down and write something - poetry, prose, reportage, dramatic scene - about the event or the theatre or the founders. Any combination of any of these. It is one of those out-of-the-ordinary commissions that is hard to resist. In the meantime eat goulash and listen to a Nigel Kennedy concert, possibly tramp the hills. This is while reading over the text of the forthcoming anthology of younger poets that I have just edited and answering some questions from the publishers. It will go into rapid production after that - ready for early November publication.

On returning I shall have one day home before flying off to Berlin with C to the Berliner Festspiele otherwise known as the 9th International Literature Festival where I am doing an evening event with novelist friend Katharina Hacker.

Things don't end there. September and October's diary is full of dates and engagements. Details to follow.

In the meantime, one of my poems, as previously noted, is on the Forward shortlist for best poem of the year (I would be astounded if it won), and the Tiffey book, aka Shuck, Hick, Tiffey is shortlisted for the EDP-Jarrold East Anglian Book Awards 2009. I'm in the Places and Nature section. Up against Roger Deakin there, alas. This is however terrific for the Gatehouse Press and Meirion Jordan's Strangers Hall, also Gatehouse Press. Many congratulations to them! Meirion was one of my MA students at UEA. He is in the Fiction and Poetry category and is up against Philip Leslie and Jeremy Page. He is also shortlisted for the Forward First Book Prize. What a tremendous start in his career!

Language crime / Mountain language

I pick this up from Budapest Analyses, a FIDESZ think tank, a source I rarely refer to but which I continue to receive and read. On this issue all Hungarian parties are united and who could not but be with them?

The Slovak state has language laws very similar to those of Romania in Ceausescu's time. The difference is that this is post-1989 and that both Hungary and Slovakia are members of the EU.

(Later) My highlights.

Summary:
Slovak-Hungarian relations have greatly deteriorated between neighboring Hungary and Slovakia, both member countries of NATO and the EU. The source of the deepening tension has been the passage, on June 30, 2009, of additional restrictive amendments to the Meciar era Slovak State Law 270 of 1995. These restrictive amendments were passed even after the Hungarian minority in Slovakia and Hungary herself expressed their concerns...

...The most significant problems of the law are:

1. The introduction of a new category of crime, „language crime”, or the criminalization of the use of the Hungarian language. Section 3 of the law prescribes as mandatory the use of Slovak, both written and oral, for official interactions in many areas of daily life. What this amounts to is that, for instance, an ethnic Hungarian bus driver and an ethnic Hungarian passenger, an ethnic Hungarian postal worker and an ethnic Hungarian resident, or an ethnic Hungarian fireman and an ethnic Hungarian victim of a fire are prohibited from communicating with each other in Hungarian. According to §9, the language use in these interactions may be monitored by the Ministry of Culture. According to §2, local authorities may do likewise. Based on this law, then, Slovak citizens whose native language is Hungarian are liable for prosecution if, under certain circumstances, they use their common native language to communicate with each other. Section §2 and §9 of the law not only allows for, but essentially mandates that a report be filed for any infraction.

2. Fines for using Hungarian within the Hungarian community. Section 9/a of the law prescribes that fines ranging from 100 to 5,000 EUR be issued under the jurisdiction of the Slovak Ministry of Culture to legal persons for perceived shortcomings or violations of the law. This means that in many workplaces (transport services, post offices and fire stations, as well as the police, local governments or any company) fines may be imposed, if ethnic Hungarian employees providing services to ethnic Hungarians use Hungarian in their official capacity. Since, according to Slovak law, the employee is responsible for fines imposed upon his/her workplace, fines imposed on the workplace de facto amount to fines imposed upon ethnic Hungarians for using their native language. In addition, §11 and 11/a of the law de facto provide for retroactive penalties and mandate the replacement of existing monuments, memorial plaques, and gravestones (!) whose inscriptions are largely or entirely in Hungarian, and prescribes that the cost of the required modifications must be borne by the legal or natural persons who erected or commissioned them.

3. Discrimination. It follows from the above that certain Slovak citizens (for instance, those whose native language is Hungarian) are subject to monitoring, harassment and penalties for using their native language, while other Slovak citizens (for instance, those whose native language is Slovak or Czech) are not. Section §3 of the law is openly discriminative, since the Czech minority may use their native language without restrictions, which means that members of other minorities are prohibited from using theirs. As in many areas of Europe, including Slovakia, ethnic identity and the use of the native language are closely intertwined, which means that discrimination in native language use amounts to discrimination based on ethnicity.

4. Violations of the freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Section 5 of the law provides, as a general rule, that all media outlets – both public and privately owned media – must use the Slovak language, with the exception of programs transmitted for national minorities. This means that Hungarian-speaking citizens cannot set up a radio or television station that transmits programs exclusively in Hungarian. The law requires that programs broadcast on local public address systems always be announced in Slovak first, regardless of the ethnic composition of the locality. Hungarian inscriptions on monuments, memorials and gravestones (which must always come second to a Slovak-language inscription) must be approved in advance by the Ministry of Culture. This represents state censorship, and contradicts the freedom of language use and the freedom of expression.

5. Violation of freedom of association and religion. Section 5 of the State Language Law provides that cultural and educational programs should be in Slovak, with the exception of „educational” programs aimed at minority audiences. This means that organizations and associations are not free to choose the language of their activities and programs. For instance, in a settlement populated by ethnic Hungarians, the Hungarian language may be used in a presentation on Hungarian historical figures, but if the program involves American history, it cannot be performed or carried out in Hungarian, because the subject matter is not Hungarian. Section 3 of the law is a violation of the freedom of association and freedom of religion, since it restricts the use of language in the institutional life of associations and churches. The churches can freely choose only the language in which they conduct their services; they have no choice about the language in which they conduct administrative process and provide public information.

6. Limitations on existing regulations protecting minorities. Section 1(4) of the amended State Language Law asserts that the separate regulations governing the use of minority languages are applicable only if the directives of the State Language Law do not provide otherwise. This statement completely transforms the existing (already very weak) legal protections for minority languages and for the speakers of minority languages, since it gives unmistakable preference to protecting the State Language over the protection of minority rights.

It's the same old repressive answer to the same old ongoing ethnic / language problem, a ghost problem, a problem that isn't really a problem at all, nevertheless a problem intensely exacerbated in regions with continually redrawn national boundaries, in which the party representing the most backward, reactionary, paranoid, nationalistic elements in the country - in this case, Slovakia - needs a scapegoat.

Stop them speaking to each other, is the solution. Watch them carefully. Make their lives as hard as you can. They should not be aiming to be a version of themselves, but an inferior version of us.

But how does the EU respond? Does it respond?

Darkness in summer

The rain that has been threatening all day in gusts, in great gouts of skittering cloud, has finally arrived. The sky is so dark you can imagine it all compact with water, so dense with it, you could practically step into it as into a bath.

There is something ravishingly lovely about such moments of thick late daytime darkness and the shattering of raindrops against glass. Being inside, at my desk with an old anglepoise creating a cocoon of light, smelling the rain even through closed window and door - because I can clearly smell it - is dizzying and comforting at the same time.

Ad as I look out it seems to get ever darker, ever more a doomed, sunken, remnant blue or idigo, but indigo with depth. The window is running with rain. Nothing but silhouette outside.

It's pure poetry, this stuff:

Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville ;
Quelle est cette langueur
Qui pénètre mon coeur ?

Ô bruit doux de la pluie
Par terre et sur les toits !
Pour un coeur qui s'ennuie,
Ô le chant de la pluie !

Il pleure sans raison
Dans ce coeur qui s'écoeure.
Quoi ! nulle trahison ?...
Ce deuil est sans raison.

C'est bien la pire peine
De ne savoir pourquoi
Sans amour et sans haine
Mon coeur a tant de peine !

(Verlaine)

And this from the Hungarian of Zsuzsa Rakovszky (my translation)

Raining

raining raining it started
this morning summer gone out
a match dipped in water
it will fall now a long time
mad summer cools slows down
grows sluggish grey spills
across blue yellow red
brilliant now streaming down
windows damp wind behind
a great whale flounders in
the gutter its colours
oil and mud raining why
should we go out and do
things do nothing nothing
flop on the bed together your
arm under my neck for
a long time since nothing
can happen for a long time
no going out now for
a long time it will rain
now for a long time it
will rain for a long time

Gorgeous! Provide own punctuation and let it all wash together in the rain.

Which, by the way, is still going, a little prettier and lighter now, pinpricks, that's all.

Márai on class and qualified tradesmen

Judit, the ex-maid speaking to her lover, shortly after the Communist take-over in Budapest, reflecting on her days in service. She married the young master of the house, of course. And divorced him too, a lot richer, but, by now, a fair bit older. Here she reflects of middle-class manias and indifference.

The old woman had a cleaning mania. Despite the servant with his tidying and me with my work she would call in outside cleaners once a month, people who arrived like the fire brigade, complete with ladders and strange machines, who washed and scraped and fumigated just about everything. We also had a regular window cleaner whose one job was to wash and wipe the windows that we, the resident staff, had already washed. The laundry room smelled like an operating theater, where they destroy the germs by radiating the place with blue lamps. It was so superior, this laundry room, you might have taken it for an expensive, upper class funeral parlor. I never entered it without a sense of faint religious awe, and then only when her ladyship allowed me in to help the laundress who washed, ironed and folded linen as precisely as a village woman washing the dead and sorting the newly dead man’s clothes. You may be sure they weren’t about to trust me, a slattern by comparison, with delicate, highly professional work such as the great annual wash!... It was a special laundress who came, summoned by an open postcard from her ladyship to the effect that she should rejoice and prepare, for the dirty washing was waiting for her!... And of course she did come, delighted to be of use. My help was limited to assisting her put the finest shirts, underwear and damask tablecloths through the mangle. On no account would they trust me with the washing itself!.. But there came a day when the laundress did not appear when called. Instead thre was a postcard written by her daughter. I remember every word of it since it was I who took the post upstairs and, naturally, I read whatever was not in an envelope. This was what the laundress’s daughter wrote: “Dear madam, I regret to inform your kind ladyship that my mother can’t come to do the washing because she is dead.” She signed it, “Your humble servant, Ilonka.” I remember the way her ladyship wrinkled her brow as she read the card. She looked cross and shook her head. But she didn’t say anything. At that point I stepped forward and volunteered and, for a while, they let me do the washing, at least until a new laundress was found, one who was a laundress by trade and was still alive.

Because everything in that household was done by qualified tradesmen. ‘Qualified’ was one of their favorite words. If the doorbell broke it wasn’t the manservant who fixed it but a tradesman called in for the occasion. They trusted no-one but qualified tradesmen. There was one fellow who came regularly, a man with a ceremonial air, wearing a bowler. He was like a university professor called to a council meeting in the provinces. His job was to cut corns. But he wasn’t just any old cutter of corns, the kind people like us sometimes visit in town, slipping off our shoes and extending our feet so they can slice the corn or an extra growth of hard skin away. What a thought!... He wasn’t even a common kind of home chiropodist – we would never have allowed one of those in the house. No, this man had a business card, you could find his telephone number in the directory. What it said on the card was: Swedish pedicure. We had a Swedish pedicurist come to the house once a month. He always wore black and handed over his hat and gloves with such ceremony when he entered I felt so overcome with awe that I almost kissed his hand. My own feet were frostbitten, on account, as you know, of those damp winters in the ditch and I had corns and bunyons and ingrowing toenails that were so painful I could hardly walk. But I would never have dreamt of asking this foot artist to touch mine. He brought a bag with him, like a doctor. He put on a white gown, carefully washed his hands in the bathroom, preparing himself for the operation, then took an electric gadget from his bag, something like a small dentist’s drill, sat himself down by her ladyship or the old man, or my husband and set to work with the electric chisel shaving away the hardened parts of their gracious skin… So that’s our corn cutter. I must say, darling, one of the high points of my life was when I was lady of that refined house and ordered the maid to call the ‘Swedish pedicurist’ because I desired to have my refined corns treated. Everything happens in life eventually if you wait long enough. Well, this happened.

Not that he was the only qualified tradesman to call round. A great deal of such activity followed the moment I brought the old man his orange juice. He lay in bed with the bedside light on and read an English newspaper. The Hungarian papers, of which there were a great many in the house, were only read by us servants, in the kitchen or in the toilet when we were bored. The old woman read the German press, the old man the English, but mostly only those pages that were full of long columns of numbers, the daily updates on foreign stock-markets, because while he wasn’t a great reader of English the numbers did interest him… The young gentleman read now the German, now the French papers, but as far as I could see only the headlines. I expect they thought these papers were better informed than ours, could crow a bit louder and tell bigger, more whopping lies. That appealed to me too. I’d gather up whole bed-sheets full of foreign papers in the various rooms, nervous and awestruck.

So, after the orange juice, when it didn’t happen to be the Swedish pedicurist, it was the masseuse. She wore lorgnettes and was quite rude. I knew she stole, dabbling with sticky fingers in the bathroom among the creams and cosmetics. But she pinched cakes too, and the exotic fruits the manservant had left in the parlor from the day before… she’d quickly stuff her face with two mouthfuls, not because she was hungry, simply to deprive the house of something. Then she’d enter her ladyship’s room and give her a thorough pounding.