Marilyn Bowering's Blog
October 11, 2012
Childhood
Recently, the filmmaker Anna Tchernakova asked me, for a project she’s working on, to think of three objects from my childhood bedroom that were so essential that if I had them again, I’d be able to re-create the room. We moved many times when I was a child, but the room I think of first is the one that has been in my mind when I’ve been writing the poems in Soul Mouth (www.ExileEditions.com ISBN 978-1-55096-300-7; Fall 2012)
The house was set in an orchard and we lived there with my grandparents. I shared the bedroom with my brother, and so my personal space was restricted. My three objects were a ukulele, a blackboard (and chalk) I carried everywhere so I could draw, and a white ‘comforter’ covered in tiny roses. I heaped the comforter over my head whenever I wanted privacy—mostly to tell stories to an imaginary friend or to negotiate encounters with some of the peculiar people who turned up at my grandmother’s house. (One of these was a very old lady, dressed in voluminous black, who carried an ear trumpet: I’ve not seen anyone like her since!) It hadn’t occurred to me, until I heard ME answer the same question with descriptions of his pets (a canary, a budgie and a white mouse) how clearly the objects represented fundamental traits.
Almost by definition, the books loved in childhood are slow books: we love to hear them over and over; and when we’re grownups may return to them not only to read to our own children, but for reassurance. Poems and stories kept in memory, fairy-tales, and bed time stories are part of this repertoire: I still love to be read to and I know I’m not alone in saying that being read to by my husband was part of how I fell in love.
Books about childhood, or rooted in childhood, can be powerful. A Slow Book choice in this category would be the Swedish-Finnish author, Tove Jansson’s, The Summer Book. Focused on the relationship between six year old Sophia and her grandmother, the story unfolds over a number of summers spent on a Finnish island. The limits of the landscape and volatility of the weather add to the clarity of a portrayal of the girl and her family following the death of the child’s mother. Images of old age; childhood fears; life and death and the sea; and especially the passionate nature of Sophia make for a book that is both pure and unsentimental. I’ve read it three times. I know that child—I miss her.
July 8, 2012
The China Run
The China Run by Neil Paterson, Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., London 1948
The China Run, the Scottish writer Neil Paterson’s account of the life of his great-grandmother, Christian, a sea-captain in the China trade, is a slim volume of ninety-five pages. I’ve read it at least half-a-dozen times, each time with immense pleasure in both the story and the style. Christian (1829-1893) lived an obscure life in the port of Banff on Scotland’s east coast until in 1845, when she was sixteen, a strange ship arrived, its Captain fell in love with her and took her back to his home port in Wales. I won’t tell the entire story here, but she turned out to have a gift for navigation, and by the time the window of an exotic, adventurous life closed for Christian in 1863 when it was proven in court that a woman was not a fit person to have command of a ship at sea, to represent Her Majesty in her trade abroad and to hold a position of authority over men, she had successfully traded in China, Australia and South America, survived numerous attempts on her life and honour, fought off pirates and been pursued around the world by the flamboyant American ship’s Master, Tancy McCoy.
Here is Paterson’s account of their first meeting:
‘Of his appearance at least there is no doubt. Christian, descending the stairs from the painter’s attic [where her portrait was underway in Foo Chow Foo] to the saloon, saw him as “a tall, heavily built man, deeply browned by sun and wind, not ill-favoured yet with a reckless air, his cap on the back of his head, and a look in his eyes which I first took to be merry and half smiled to him in answer, but which I saw then to be most insolent, and could have torn the lips from my face in my chagrin.”
‘“Yes,” Tancy McCoy said. “Yes, Ma’am, you should always blush. It sure is becoming. Turn around.”
‘She goggled at him and he nodded encouragingly. “Turn around,” he said, and before she realized what she was about she had turned. Tancy McCoy had that sort of influence on people.’
Her later downfall came about in the usual manner—through the envy and greed of relatives and the judgment of conventional society.
I love Paterson’s comment, when he compares two portraits painted of Christian, one at the height of her adventures and the other thirty years later when she had done her best to fade into respectability: “…I think that a hundred years ago a woman did not have a lot of fun, or if she did she had it for a short time only.”
Paterson had access to Christian’s letters, and much of the tale is told in her own words; but Paterson’s eye for character, and social detail and his clear-eyed response to his great-grandmother gives the story a sweet simplicity: it is beautifully written in straightforward and elegant prose; not a word out of place, not a sentiment too far. It remains one of the best short non-fiction books I have read.
The circumstances in which I encountered The China Run have stayed with me. We were living on an estate in Perthshire, Scotland during a winter of power-cuts. The pheasant soup froze on the stove; my toothbrush froze in the glass. I spent my days in the attic under quilts, writing, glancing at Sron a Clachain through one of the small skylights and at Ptarmigan Ridge through the other. When we were snowed in, and not even the Postie could get through to deliver the mail, and a walk to the farm at Daldravaig was out of the question with the wind howling down the tunnel of the glen, we drank whisky in bed with all our clothes on. M read the whole of McGonnagle aloud to me, but soon we were out of books; there was no library nearer than Edinburgh and we had no money for books even if there’d been any to buy.
I was in the attic working and M was downstairs blowing on the fire when he shouted to me. I went outside. Way down the road, just crowning the bridge by the Hydro station was a blue van. And it was moving. It kept coming; it stopped at Daldravaig, and then we waited excitedly to see if it would reach us. At length—after a long wait, long enough to brew tea for the driver-- the blue library van drew up in front of the gate.
We were already in our boots and coats. The driver opened his door. “How did you get here?” I asked him.
“Och, we always do,” he said.
Inside, the van walls were lined with books. I picked at random. It was growing late and I knew he had to be back in Aberfeldy and off the roads before dark.
One of the books I borrowed that day was The China Run. I read it that night and immediately read it again. Eventually, with the help of a friend, we tracked down a copy.
Paterson died in 1995 only about 45 kms from where I’d been living when I first read his book. I’d had no idea, until I looked him up just now, that he’d been an important screenwriter, too, and had written the screen-play for the film of John Braine’s novel, Room at the Top.
March 13, 2011
A Portrait of a Turkish Family, a memoir by Irfan Orga
Some of the best books I’ve found have turned up in library discard sales: there’s a cart of these near the front door of most of the libraries in my area. For a dollar or two you can buy whatever the library has decided no longer belongs on its shelves. How-To books, children’s books, thrillers and mysteries predominate: but there are occasional gems.
I don’t know how A Portrait of a Turkish Family ended up in the bin at the Bruce Hutchison library—it hadn’t come from the stacks, so was likely a gift from a Library Friend. Tucked inside it was a flyer from the English language Turkish Daily News, and there’s a Turkish lira price sticker on the back. My edition is a reprint (Eland Publishing, London, 2004) of the original 1950 Gollancz publication. The front cover quote, from Robert Fox(The Daily Telegraph) sums it up: ‘This book is a little masterpiece.’
Irfan Orga’s memoir, set in Istanbul, begins with his birth in 1908 into a prosperous and cultured family and ends with the death of his mother in 1940. In many ways, the story is his mother’s: her struggle to raise her children through a series of tragedies which starts with the death of her husband, Irfan’s father, along with hundreds of thousands of other Turkish men, in the First World War all the way to—well, I won’t explain what happens : but the family’s story reveals the impact of national and global social and political events on the most intimate details of their lives and relationships as seen through the eyes of an alert, articulate and desperate boy. Irfan’s ability to draw character, evoke place is astonishing: the writing, on every page, is clear and beautiful. Some of the scenes—the grandmother’s visit to the Hamam; the young Irfan’s circumcision, are very funny; and others of poverty and cruelty and despair are so painful that I’m loathe to remember them. Over all circles Irfan’s determination to be honest in his portrayal, to do so with general sensitivity but unsparingly of himself. His tone and accomplishment make me think of a concert violinist and the depth and meaning it is possible to convey through sound: this book resonates.
There’s no point in my sounding like a puff piece: so I’ll quote a paragraph to give the flavour. What I can’t do—and what makes this a slow book read—is to convey the reach and range of the book: it’s grasp of the story of a country, a people, and a family as they undergo profound change (remember this is the period of the end of Ottoman culture and of Turkey’s westernization) makes this a reading experience during which you want to pause and rest and reflect on your own experiences and ideas, and to consider how they are altered through the lens of Irfan Orga’s account.
With apologies for being unable to write the Turkish names with correct orthography:
“When the summer of that year was upon us we did not even have dry bread in the school and the old women used to take us to a place called Fenerbahce, where grew many big sakiz-agaci (gum trees), where the small red, resinous berries grew in thick clusters. We used to throw stones into the trees, sometimes being lucky enough to knock down the berries into the long, wild grass. These we would scramble madly for, knocking each other down to find the berries to eat them avidly, like little animals. They had a sour taste but were curiously satisfying and we used to fill our pockets, taking them back with us to the school to eat during the night. At other times we would go to Fikir Tepesi, where we would pull and eat kuzu-kulagi (sorrel), helping the younger amongst us to choose the right grasses. We would search at Kalamis for bayir-trupu (small white radishes), which gave us a raking thirst. And many times I remember eating the almond-blossom from the trees, stuffing the blooms into my ever-hungry mouth. Once in a sea field, bounding one side of our gardens, soldiers were pulling broad beans and throwing the green stalks to the edge of the field, the edge nearest our palings. We put our fingers through and took the stalks, sucking them afterwards with great relish.”
Descriptive passages, such as this, are anchored in event and character and in the matter-of-factness with which a child copes with circumstance. “It became the custom amongst us to carry salt and red pepper in little bags concealed about our person and if we were ever lucky enough to find potato peelings or raw aubergine skins, we would wash them at the pump, expertly mix them with the contents of our little bags and eat them when we were desperate with hunger.”
If ever the thought drifts through your mind that people create their own destinies and it is lack of courage or intelligence or both that govern ‘success’ this book should put an end to it. Irfan Orga’s work reminds me, in its combination of scale and particularity of Tolstoy, and in the acuteness of his eye of Laurie Lee. This book is a great legacy.
