Epiblog for the Feast of St Martin

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, with Debbie stumbling through the Ofsted visitation like a shell-shocked zombie. In the end her classes were unvisited, uninspected, another instance of that truism which I have often pointed out in these pages that 98% of the things we worry about never happen anyway or if they do happen happen in a way which is totally different to how we imagined it would be. But telling Debbie not to worry about her teaching is like telling the sun not to rise, or the waves not to come in.

The weather continues to be mostly cold, dark and miserable, such brightness as there is usually being confined to a brief burst of golden brilliant, crisp morning sunlight, before the day then dips into dim, hazy cold and darkens to chilly night. Frowsting weather, weather for toasting crumpets by the fire, weather for hot soup, or tea with a nip of rum or brandy. Sadly, we have all of the above ingredients except for the rum and brandy.

One person who knows all about toasting by the fire is Matilda, who has spent a second week consisting of alternating between Kitty’s bed in the hearth, her cardboard box in the office, or the food bowl. She has shown no inclination whatsoever to want to go outside, the nearest she gets is sitting at the conservatory door watching the birds on the bird feeder. These often include small tits. [Google, are you listening?] Freddie and Zak have gone home again now, but before they went, they did get to meet Elvis, who came to carry out his home inspection, complete with Kerrie, his handler, on Friday.

The first thing he did was hoover up the leftover dry food in Zak and Freddie's dishes, then he polished off Matilda's leavings, then he went on a sniffathon, but he seemed to get on well with Freddie and Zak, and he went for an explore round the garden on a lead, and he sat on the settee by the stove, and allowed himself to be ear-furfled by all and sundry. Generally, he seemed happy enough though. Funnily enough, the fact that he looks a bit like Tig, which didn't seem to matter at all when we saw him in the kennel environment, was quite affecting when he was actually sitting here, in places where she used to sit.

Because Matilda was in her little box up in the office, asleep, for the duration of his visit, and we didn’t think it was a good idea either to wake her up specially or, even worse, to let Elvis go and wake her up specially, we let her sleep on, but we don’t really have any lasting concerns on that score: where he is now, Elvis lives with 13 cats, and by the time Zak and Freddie went home, Matilda had begun studiously ignoring them, so if she does the same with Elvis, and he’s indifferent to cats, we should be home and dry.

Friday was a busy day, and I didn’t get much done, what with tidying up ready for Elvis’s visit, then the visit itself, and before that, Bernard turned up out of the blue bearing some dried cornflowers and lavender for Debbie, and a copy of his niece’s book on Mirfield for me, which he is hoping we’ll be able to help sell through our web site. Still, it was good to see him again, however briefly. And by the end of Friday it was good, also, to all sit round our own fire again and give thanks that we’d all survived another week, more or less. As I write this, a complication has arisen over whether we can be allowed to take on Elvis, over the security or otherwise of our garden, and we’re now once more back to the negotiating stage over this new development. We shall see.

On Saturday morning, we decided that we had better get the tomato harvest in which didn’t take long because there are but two, only one of which is red. Anyway, we ate the ceremonial tomato, or rather Debbie did, sliced up on her breakfast crumpet, on top of some bruschetta topping. I can’t help but feel that, given all the care and attention that has been lavished on producing that one tomato over the summer, its passing should have been marked with more ceremony, perhaps being paraded around the Quad first on a silver salver by liveried footmen in tabards singing Latin graces. Anyway, there it was, gone.

Talking of ceremony, I also discovered on Saturday that we have a new Archbishop of Canterbury. The new Archbishop of Canterbury said he was amazed to be given the job, and his first reaction on hearing the news was “Oh No”. Well, given his views on gay marriage and the inevitable irrelevant infighting over the issue that will now proceed to rive the Church apart and stop it doing what it actually should be doing, that made two of us.

Saturday evening marked the eve of Remembrance Day and we found ourselves somehow watching the choir of military wives singing in the Albert Hall. I asked Debbie if she would consider joining a choir to sing about how much she was missing me if I was posted overseas. She replied that given my vast bulk, no one would post me anywhere, let alone overseas, because they wouldn’t be able to afford the postage or find a big enough box. So that told me.

Primarily, of course, today is Remembrance Sunday, and it falls, this year, actually on 11th November. As each year goes by, though, I find myself becoming more and more conflicted over the ideas behind this event. On the one hand, obviously I want to remember people like my Great Uncle Harry, of the Royal Field Artillery, who I never knew, gassed at Ypres in 1917 or Deb’s relatives William Evans of the Suffolk Regiment, died of wounds in 1915, or Jack Ross DFC, lost in his Hurricane over the Irish Sea in January 1942

But it also seems to me that a new agenda has been subtly grafted on to the arrangements, a veneer of the same sort of compulsory patriotism that marred the Olympics. The subtle pressure that says, in effect, that commemorating the fallen on Remembrance Day now comes “bundled” with the assumption that you are also supporting “Our Troops” and you are therefore, ipso facto, behind the current operations in Afghanistan.

This is a “mission creep” too far, for me. While I regret the loss of life and admire their skill, professionalism and bravery, I do think in many ways our forces out there are just being used now as “professional targets” in an unwinnable war, to save the faces and the reputations of the politicians that put them in harm’s way in the first place, and who have the hypocritical gall to stand before the Cenotaph in Whitehall carrying wreaths.

I have never been particularly in favour of the Afghanistan war, the more so now it also involves indiscriminate loss of civilian life and drone attacks (increased tremendously during the Obama presidency). To do the job properly in Afghanistan would require massive resources and a garrison force in perpetuity, both of which the politicians (of all parties) know would be politically unpopular, indeed impossible, especially as it might involve increasing taxation to pay for something like that, in a time of austerity and defence cuts. So they send our troops into the valley of death in an unwinnable conflict, with shortages of equipment asking them to die in a vain attempt to impose “western values” on a country in the grip of violent medieval thugs who are quite happy to shoot a girl in the head just because she wants to go to school.

There is so much wrong with Afghanistan, and none of it can be solved with bullets and bombs. And these same politicians who ask our armed forces to carry out this mission impossible, when the soldiers and airmen come back, perhaps having lost a limb or having suffered other injuries, and they leave the service or are even, sometimes, made redundant, these same politicians leave it to charities to pick up the pieces, when people develop mental problems, suffer from stress, or even lose their livelihood and become homeless.

So no, I am afraid – I will wear my poppy, but I will wear it for my own reasons, and not because I am in favour of war in Afghanistan. In many ways, like Iraq, it was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and for all the wrong reasons. It is, in many ways, appropriate that poppies grow in Afghanistan, as they grew in Flanders almost a century ago, because our casualties there are being sacrificed in the same mindless way as the First World War soldiers were, and for similar vague hopes and aspirations. Lions led by donkeys, I am afraid.

I also tend to think, at this time of year, of my Dad and what his war experience would have been like. Physically, at any rate, he was lucky enough to come through the whole five years of struggle against Hitler unscathed, apart from the partial deafness (caused by the guns) which he suffered from for the remainder of his days. I think of what it must have been like for him, sitting up there on the cliffs at Fairlight with his ack-ack unit. Probably a bit like life in general, I suppose, long periods of relative inactivity and boredom, interspersed with a few seconds of blind panic, terror and danger.

I’ve actually done a certain amount of research around the subject, because I wanted to use the material in an as yet unfinished family history project, and there is actually a substantial body of stuff on the Hastings area in wartime, both official accounts, web sites compiled by amateur military historians and oral history and memoirs by people who were there at the time.

Although the pressure eased after the end of the Battle of Britain, when Hitler turned his attention eastwards to attack Russia, the south coast towns such as Hastings still remained very much in the danger zone for the remainder of the conflict.

A change of tactic occurred in March 1942 when fighter-bombers were modified to carry bombs. This resulted in what were called “tip-and-run” raids whereby, as the name suggests, the German fighter-bombers would sneak in fast and low, drop their bombs and then high-tail it back to France. The first tip-and-run raid on Hastings occurred on 17th May 1942 when four Messerschmidt 109s circled the town, machine-gunning the streets in the West Hill area. Twenty-eight year old Constance Ethel Torrance was killed when a bullet penetrated the window of her house, at 60 St George's Road. Formerly Constance Ethel Beale, she had been born in 1914 to Richard Beale and his wife Lydia, whose maiden name was Lydia Nice, and had married Jack Torrance in 1938.

It was on 17th October 1942 (which was also Granny Fenwick’s birthday – she would have been 55 that year) when Feldwebel Karl Hermann Niesel of Jagdgeschwader 26 set off in his Focke-Wulf 190 in a “tip and run” raid on Hastings. Sadly for Hermann, or “Uncle Hermann” as he was known by his family, he came to the attention of two Hawker Typhoons of No. 486 (New Zealand) Squadron. The following extract is from the combat report of P/O Thomas and Sgt Sames "A" Flight No.486 (NZ) Squadron (AIR50/160) and tells the brief, sad and unromantic story of his demise.

“P/O. G. G. Thomas (Yellow 1) and Sgt. A. N. Sames (Yellow 2) airborne 13.15 hours for Coastal Patrol Beachy Head - Dungeness. At 13.25 hours when flying East to West at 500 feet about half a mile inland they observed two FW 190s flying roughly NE over the sea at 20/30 feet and about one and a half miles ahead. Yellow 1 saw a bomb burst in the town[Hastings]. The enemy aircraft then turned port due South and out to sea where they split up, one flying SE at sea level and the other continuing South at about 20/30 feet followed by Yellow Section flying at 345/350 a.s.l. Yellow 1 opened fire at long range with several short bursts of cannon fire and noticed slashes in the sea short of the enemy aircraft which immediately started to weave.

Yellow Section closed to within 500 yards and enemy aircraft began a spiral weave. Yellow 1 opened fire again with several short bursts and observed strikes on the side of the fuselage. The enemy aircraft pulled up violently and then winged over to port and down to sea level right across Yellow 2's line of fire, then straightened out and climbed up slowly. Yellow 2 fired three more short bursts striking fuselage and engine.

A jet of flame burst from the starboard side of the engine, the hood was jettisoned and parts of the enemy aircraft fell away and it turned over and fell burning into the sea, disappearing immediately. In the meantime the other aircraft had escaped in the direction of France. Yellow Section returned to the English coast and on approaching Hastings at about 6/700 feet were fired upon by coastal guns without effect”

Yes, regarding the bit about the British coastal guns firing at their own planes, it was probably my Dad! He always used to tell me that they fired at it first, whatever it was, then looked it up afterwards.

Hermann Niesel was the youngest but one of seven children; he had five older sisters: Edith (1907), Johanna (1908), Herta (1910), Ruth (1911) and Irma (1912) and one younger brother Karlheinz (1920), who died 1922, two years old. Hermann Niesel was not married and had no children, he was betrothed to a girl called Hanni Kuhne. They intended to marry after the end of the war. Hanni was a Red Cross Sister during the hostilities.

Hermann’s progression in flying was probably typical of many young men in the Luftwaffe, learning at first with a glider on a gliding field near Hirschberg (now Jelenia Gora), and becoming a flight instructor for gliders by the beginning of 1934. Then he went into the Luftwaffe, and he was in the Spanish Civil War with the Condor Legion. After the war Silesia was given to Poland and the Niesels were relocated, like many more of the German population in Silesia.

I’ve given his story in some detail to show, I suppose, that, contrary to the cardboard cut-out “Squareheads” and “Huns” that filled the war films and comics of my childhood, he was a real person, and his loss in the English Channel, with no known grave, was no doubt mourned by other real people. True, he had just dropped a bomb on Hastings, and that also killed real people, just as we dropped bombs on Germany, because they had dropped them on us, and so on. Niesel’s attack hit Pevensey Road, Warrior Square, and St Columb’s Church, killing two civilians and wounding 16. And given the chance, no doubt he would have done to the pilots of those two Typhoons what they did to him. And meanwhile, down below on the cliffs, my Dad was busily trying to kill all of them, even the ones on his own side!

It just goes to point up the absurd tragedy of war. Here you have two people born within a year of each other, Constance Torrance and Hermann Niesel. You can almost imagine them growing up, falling in love; meanwhile, over the other side of the world, two young New Zealanders are growing up, learning to fly, and the chain of events, the skein of sequences, somehow contrives to bring them all to Hastings, 70 years ago, where Constance is struck one day by bullet fired through her window from a German plane on 17th May, and Hermann is brought down off the seafront by a stream of cannon shells on 17th October. Jack mourns for Constance and Hanni mourns for Hermann, and the people who knew and loved the civilians he killed mourn their dead, and you take all that pain and extrapolate it across all of the other losses and the mourning and you begin to question even the very basic premises that underlie it all, even though, admittedly the Second World War was, from our point of view, the nearest thing to a “just” war that we have experienced, because it was about more than merely curbing Germany’s territorial intentions, it was about stopping Hitler’s insane one-man mission to enslave the planet. But even so the waste, the waste…

The military theme continues with today’s saint, St Martin of Tours, or “Martinmas”. His feast day marked the time when the harvest was complete (well we did pick the only ripe tomato) and hiring fairs were held so that agricultural labourers could seek new posts for the following year.

St. Martin of Tours started out as a Roman soldier. He was baptized as an adult and became a monk. It is understood that he was a kind man who led a quiet and simple life. The most famous legend of his life is that he once cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar during a snowstorm, to save the beggar from dying of the cold. That night he dreamed that Jesus himself was wearing the piece of cloak he had given away. Martin heard Jesus say to the angels: "Here is Martin, the Roman soldier who is not baptised; he has clothed me."

From the late 4th century to the late Middle Ages, much of Europe, including the UK, engaged in a period of fasting beginning on the day after St. Martin's Day lasting for 40 days, and called "Quadragesima Sancti Martini", or "the forty days of St. Martin." On St. Martin's eve, people ate and drank very heartily for the last time before they started to fast. This period of fasting was later shortened and became what we now call “Advent”.

There are many weird and wacky customs associated with St Martin, including, historically, sacrificing cockerels in Ireland. Also in Ireland, no wheel of any kind was to turn on St. Martin's Day, because Martin was thrown into a mill stream and killed by the wheel and so it was judged to be not right to turn any kind of wheel on that day.

In some parts of the Germany, Netherlands and Belgium, children make their own lantern and go door to door with the lantern, and sing St. Martin songs, in exchange for sweets, a follow—on from the “Souling” for soul-cakes we talked about last week.

St Martin is also credited with a prominent role in spreading wine-making throughout the Touraine region and facilitating the planting of many vines. The Greek myth that Aristaeus first discovered the concept of pruning the vines after watching a goat eat some of the foliage has been somehow transferred to Martin. Martin is also credited with introducing the Chenin Blanc grape varietal, from which most of the white wine of western Touraine and Anjou is made. And very nice it is, too; before it became too expensive to buy, Touraine was one of my favourites.

Because of this element of being thankful for the fruits of the earth, and its association with the end of harvest and preparations for winter, St. Martin's Feast is much like the American Thanksgiving (celebrated on the 4th Thursday in November) a celebration of the earth's bounty. Because it also comes before the penitential season of Advent, it is seen as a mini "carne vale", with all the attendant feasting and bonfires. As at Michaelmas on 29 September, goose is eaten in most places (the goose is a symbol for St. Martin himself. It is said that as he was hiding from the people who wanted to make him Bishop, a honking goose gave away his hiding spot). I can only assume the same method was employed when picking the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

In many countries, including Germany, Martinmas celebrations begin at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of this eleventh day of the eleventh month. Bonfires are built, and children carry lanterns in the streets after dark, singing songs for which they are rewarded with candy. Many of these associations are obviously graftings of pre-Christian pagan ceremonies or events, and the result is a curious mixture now, where the pagans have surrendered the Martinmas Bonfires to the Christians, who have in turn rendered them up to Guy Fawkes, and the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month has now been appropriated as the formula for the Armistice.

In some regions of Germany, the traditional sweet of Martinmas is "Martinshörnchen", a pastry shaped in the form of a croissant, which recalls both the hooves of St. Martin's horse and, by being the half of a pretzel, the division of his cloak with the beggar. Another widespread custom in Germany is bonfires on St. Martin's eve, called "Martinsfeuer." In recent years, the processions that accompany those fires have been spread over almost a fortnight before Martinmas, but previously, the Rhine River valley, for example, would be lined with fires on the eve of Martinamas.

Sadly, that is not the only time the Rhine Valley has been lined with fires, there were quite a few, less happy occasions between 1939 and 1945 when it was ablaze from end – see also under Coventry, Rotterdam, Hull, the East End of London, Hamburg, and, finally, Dresden. I wonder whether Hermann Niesel ever ate Martinshornschen, or watched Martinsfeuer.

So, anyway, today I have been mostly meditating on the futility of war, which ought to be a no-brainer. Well it is a no-brainer, all meditation is. Am I against war? When you look at the absurdities of it, the random evil of it, yes, as a concept, I conclude I am, apart from, perhaps, the need to stop another Hitler or to defend our country against unprovoked aggression, but for me, the latter stops at the White Cliffs of Dover, and doesn’t extend to misguided foreign adventurism that comes with a heavy price tag.

Maybe St Martin, paring off half of his cloak and giving it to a frozen beggar, could be a paradigm for a new kind of armed forces, more emergency services than armed services. God knows, with all the freak weather happening all over the world, there is a need for it. War is a failure of the political process, and the people who are stopping us beating the swords into ploughshares and stopping us clothing the beggars and feeding the hungry are not the soldiers. By and large, our soldiers, sailors and airmen did, and continue to do, their best. They’ve proved, by and large, to be as humane as possible in Afghanistan when dealing with wounded opponents or allies, at a terrible cost sometimes, when the injured ally turns out to be not injured at all, and not an ally.

I don’t begrudge the soldiers, sailors and airmen their Remembrance Day, and I don’t blame them. I blame the politicians.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Birstan

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and one of my least favourite weeks in the whole calendar, given that it contains both Halloween and the start of November, my least favourite month in the whole calendar. Its only redeeming feature, as a week, being that it also contains half term, so at least Debbie has not had to venture out in the cold and the frost to far flung exotic places such as Stalybridge. That pleasure is still to resume, next week. The weather forecast for any places where we did want to go, however, was so poohey that we abandoned the idea of getting off in the camper, full stop. The only good thing that can be said about last week is that no-one has pulled the door handle off…yet.

The squirrels are conspicuous by their absence, Brenda and Freda seem to have gone to ground, though there are still a few birds hanging around the bird feeder and the table on the decking, especially small tits. [I have emphasised that particular species in a shameless attempt to entice Google’s web crawler spider program to pick up the words for when people type them into search engines, and potentially increase dramatically the number of readers of this blog. Many of them will, of course, go away disappointed, but it’s the hits that count.]

Things will resume next week with a vengeance, in fact, because Ofsted are now threatening to visit the college, which has thrown the whole college admin staff into a flat panic, as they may well have to actually do something to justify their existence, which will be a new experience for many of them. Deb is hoping that Ofsted will largely bypass her; she can’t really envisage them setting off mob-handed to the sort of run-down tin sheds on Godforsaken housing estates to provide “Outreach” in the hinterland that education forgot, just on the offchance of catching her out without a risk assessment or something.

Nevertheless, just in case, she has been boning up on all of this stuff which everybody on the staff is supposed to carry round in their heads with them at all times, including personal evacuation plans for students with mobility problems and ethnic diversity training manuals. She was bemoaning the latter in a phone call to Granny only yesterday, who replied “Never mind, at least it will earn you some brownie points.” I don’t think she’s really got the hang of this diversity idea, somehow. [Before you all email in to tell me, I know that the “brownie” in brownie points refers to small girl scouts rather than any supposed ethnic origin, but why pass up the opportunity for a feeble and possibly tastelessly offensive joke at my Mother-in-Law’s expense? And, let’s face it, I could have made a joke about my having a “personal evacuation plan” featuring Senna Pods. But I spared you that one.]

The animals don’t like the weather any more than I do. Zak and Freddie have been disputing the ownership of Zak’s armchair. While Zak vacates it temporarily to snaffle Freddie’s breakfast (or whatever he has left of it) Freddie nips in behind him and jumps up into the chair. This morning, it was so cold that Zak got back into the armchair regardless of the fact that Freddie was already in it, and after a degree of shuffling round and settling down, they reached an accommodation that allowed them to share their body-warmth to maximum effect.

Matilda, meanwhile, has been spending most of her time curled up and sleeping on Kitty’s old bin-bag/beanbag of paper shreddings in the hearth, on which we have spread out her new crocheted blanket from her Auntie Maisie, and she seems duly appreciative of this. In the last 24 hours the only time she has moved from it has been to visit the food dish.

It has been pointed out to me by several people that I have sort of introduced Elvis into proceedings without either relating any of his history or indeed continuing the story by telling what happened when we went to meet him, so please allow me to rectify that omission. Elvis was a stray who was rescued from the side of a road in Cyprus, where he was living – or rather slowly dying – by scavenging. He had the lungworm infection very badly, and there is no doubt in my mind that his life was saved by those selfless saints of Cyprus Pride, June and Michael. Shipped back to England, Elvis racked up an £1800 vet bill, and his life hung in the balance for many months, but he pulled through, albeit at the loss of some of his lung mass. He will be susceptible to kennel cough for the remainder of his days. Nobody really knows how old he is.

The journey to the kennels at Ferrybridge was a horrendous one, of the sort I used to hate when driving. I was very glad Debbie was at the wheel. Mile after mile of roadworks along the M62, 50mph average speed restriction, and heavy traffic bunched together in rain and spray, all the way. Eventually the impressive bulk of Ferrybridge’s cooling towers indicated that it was time to turn off, and despite following the directions provided to the letter, we drove past the kennels twice, once from each direction, reasoning [incorrectly, as it turned out] that this couldn’t possibly be the entrance.

Once we got there, the staff were very welcoming and even produced a cup of steaming coffee for me! They also produced Elvis, who jumped up into the camper van and started sniffing around. Kerrie, who is in charge of him, and indeed, seemingly the whole establishment, says that, because of his background history as a one-time scavenger, Elvis is still very food-motivated and may not know when to stop eating. Debbie cast a meaningful glance in my direction. She thinks that, like Nigella, I am one of those people whose mission in life is to fatten up those around me so that I don’t stand out so much. [I wonder if Nigella has problems with scavenging, and her husband catches her with her head in the bin and has to shout “Oi! Nigella! No! Get back on the Stairmaster!”]

In the same way that Bruce Springsteen is a perfectly ordinary American with someone else’s shoulders, Elvis is a perfectly ordinary little dog with Fred Basset’s ears. Still, despite his slightly odd external appearance, and his extensive [and expensive] medical history, we warmed to him, and I think the feeling was mutual. We are being inspected this coming Friday to see if we come up to the exacting standard necessary for re-homing a dog. Given our well-ordered and entirely conventional household, what could possibly go wrong?

That was at the very start of the week, of course, and since then it has gone downhill, as I said. I’ve not been that well, either, physically, I mean, I think I had a tinge of flu. Well, a tinge of something, anyway. The age of “shivery” is not yet dead. The weather kept the would-be trick or treaters away on Wednesday, though, and so far it’s been so quiet on the firework front, that I am wondering whether it’s another sign of the times. The people currently in Parliament have finally triumphed over the man who wanted to blow it up, by wrecking the economy to the extent that nobody can afford fireworks any more. Meanwhile, I sat clutching a hot-water bottle, gritted my teeth, and got on with the stuff I absolutely positively had to do – anything else is next week’s problem.

Talking of Parliament, our postal voting forms turned up for the Police Commissioner elections during the week, and I filled mine in. Debbie was initially going to chuck hers on the back of the fire, until I reminded her of all those racehorses that had thrown themselves under suffragettes just so she could exercise her democratic right as her own person, and not merely as my chattel or appendage. Personally I don’t have a lot of time for the idea of the Police Commissioner as a concept. I view it as part of the general political gimmickery that despoils the simple, classical symmetry of our constitutional structure, along with devolved assemblies, regional assemblies, elected mayors, MEPs, and all the other useless claptrap which merely provides extra costly layers of bureaucracy and potential conflicts of interest.

Nevertheless, despite my misgivings, it is obviously going to happen anyway, so I wrote to all four of the people who are standing in this area asking them about their stance and policy on animal mistreatment and wildlife crime. Not one of them has replied, or even attempted to contact me by either phone or email. It is no wonder people feel disenfranchised, cut off, apathetic and cynical when we have would-be politicians like these. In the end I voted for the independent candidate, for several reasons, one being that he has a very silly name, secondly he was once a serving police officer, which is more than you can say for the others, and finally, the fact he is an independent allows me to vote without my vote being seen as a proxy endorsement of the Junta or the feeble opposition. Debbie looked in vain for a UKIP or a Green to vote for, so her form may well have ended up burnt to a crisp, suffragettes or no suffragettes, and in fact, sometimes, deliberately not voting can in itself be a political act.

As well as containing Halloween and All Saints Day, which I always recall from my schooldays because we invariably sang “For all the saints, who from their labours rest” which is a great hymn, this week also brought All Souls’ Day, or, as some cultures have it, the Day of the Dead. Personally, I don’t have much trouble recalling the dead, and I think of them every day, especially at a time of the year such as this one, when the membrane between this world and the other is sometimes demonstrably thin. I often feel like Henry Vaughan, lamenting that

“They are all gone into the world of light
And I alone sit ling’ring here…”

From a folklore point of view, however, All Souls’ Day is interesting because of the tradition of “souling”, which was essentially semi-organised, semi-institutionalised begging, where gangs of urchins would go from house to house singing their “souling” songs and wishing the well being and continued existence of everyone in the house for another year, in return for some small dole of meat, drink or money. A bit like trick or treat, but without the trick.

Several “souling” songs have been collected, and the best known one is probably “Soul Cake” which has been recorded by artists as diverse as The Watersons (good version, but monotonous and scary) and Sting (bad, very bad.)

“A soul, a soul a soul cake
Please good missus, a soul cake
An apple a pear a plum or a cherry
Or any good thing to make us merry
One for Peter, One for Paul
One for him who made us all…”

My own favourite is the Edgmond Mens’ Souling Song, collected in Shropshire and performed, inter alia, by John Kirkpatrick and Sue Harris:

‘The streets they are gotten dark, dirty and cold,
We are come a-souling, this night we’ll make bold,
We are come a-souling as well doth appear,
And all that we soul for is ale and strong beer’.

Shropshire archives has the following on its web site, drawing on the work of both Roy Palmer and Charlotte Burne:

In Pulverbatch , it is thought that the last person to keep this custom going was a Mary Ward, who died in 1853 (at the age of 101). In Hopton, Mrs Gill had soul-cakes made in her house for the souling-children until her death in 1884. In 1938, Phyllis Crawford pointed out that at Wem the ‘souling cake’ had died away, but in villages near Oswestry at around the same time, including West Felton and Llynclys, children still visited local houses. Lillian Hayward stated: ‘The soul cakes are, I believe, no longer made, but nuts, sweets, and apples are put ready for them’.

The folklore site, Mother Nature Network, takes up the story:

What is known is that by the 8th century, soul cakes were given to beggars (soulers) who would say prayers for the dead on All Souls' Eve. And the price? One soul saved per cake. In other places they were given to wandering mummers, the costumed predecessors of buskers, as they entertained on Halloween. Today's trick-or-treaters are thought to be their descendants, and soul cakes are thought to be the first treats for tricks. These days, soul cakes are generally presented as a small round cake, variously spiced, often studded across the top with a cross of currants. They are part scone, part biscuit, part teacake — and a sweet little treat harkening back to the times when souls roamed this realm and Halloween was truly a haunted night.

That sounds a little early for me, and I wonder if it's a typo for 18th Century. Anyway, I suppose I should be thankful that, dire as things are at present in many ways, I’m not yet reduced to begging. I am sitting here in front of a relatively warm stove and there is food in the house. It’s a day for counting blessings, I guess. Mind you, speaking as a scavenger, those Soul Cakes look like a very good way of saving souls…

Today is also the feast of St Birstan. It is also the feast of St Charles Borromeo, a much more well-known and conventional saint, who, despite being related to the Medicis, allotted most of his income to charity, forbade himself all luxury and imposed severe penances upon himself. He sacrificed wealth, high honours, esteem and influence to become poor. During the plague and famine of 1576, in Italy, he tried to feed 60,000 to 70,000 people daily. To do this he borrowed large sums of money that required years to repay. Whereas the civil authorities fled at the height of the plague, he stayed in the city, where he ministered to the sick and the dying, helping those in want. Worn out, he died at the age of only 46.

Fascinating as St Charles Borromeo is, however, I have decided to write about Birstan instead on the Police Commissioner principle, that he has the sillier name. In fact, St Birstan’s name is not altogether decided – in some accounts he appears as Brinstan, and with a little more effort, some culinary help, and less time spent praying, could have invented chutney 900 years before Richard Branson. Bring out the Brinstan! Birstan succeeded to the See of Winchester on the resignation of St Frithestan in May 931AD. Appropriately enough in a week which contains All Souls’ Day, Birstan, “a man of exceptional piety and charity”, was devoted to prayers for the dead and also did his best to help the poor, founding the Hospital of St John, adjoining St Swithun’s Bridge in Winchester. A Norman Chapel replaced the original in the Broadway and St. Birstan's image can still be seen in the stained glass there today. He managed to combine his interest in prayer and the dead rather neatly, by dying whilst at prayer in 934AD, after only three years as Bishop.

He is best known, apparently, for an incident which occurred some years after his death. Some time at the end of the 10th century, the Bishop of Winchester, St. Aethelwold, visited the graveyard of the Old Minster (Saxon Cathedral) at Winchester, where he was shocked to find himself being addressed by the spirit of St. Birstan, thus:

"I am Birstan, former Bishop of this town" and pointing with his right hand, "This is Birinus, who first preached here," and with his left, "This is Swithun, particular patron of this church and city".

St. Aethelwold was so impressed that he reinstated the veneration of the saint as an equal to both the better known Birinus and Swithun, though he was never much known outside Hampshire. Well, maybe all that will change now, especially if my ploy with Google comes off. In the meantime, I daresay the coming week will, potentially, give me plenty of cause to employ my own personal evacuation plan, as we struggle on in our attempts to climb out of the mire, and avoid having to go a-souling!

And no, this is not me. Nice hat, though!

Epiblog for the Feast of St Jude

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. We blunder on, ever deeper into the mire of autumn. The weather’s starting to get a bit of bite to it, especially during the latter half of the week, and the trees are now more or less completely stripped of leaves, or so it seems, at any rate, from the massive heaps of them everywhere. Trying to sweep them off my ramp is a thankless task, of the type characterised by the pithy Norfolk saying “you’m farting against thunder, Bor!”

Monday morning dawned, spawning a day of disasters. Debbie was getting ready to drive over Wessenden to drop down to Stalybridge that way, the previous week’s route via Holme Bridge having proved a bit of a duff effort, with massive traffic queues at Tintwistle. She was hoping that her class of trainee footballers would put in a solid session, because the time allotted for the course by the college is ridiculously short. On her way out she forgot her phone and her lanyard, and in coming back in for them, she managed to pull the handle off the door, passing it to me, leaving me holding it and contemplating the devastation left by her sudden exit.

When I came back in after having fixed it, nithered to the bane and desperately seeking warmth in front of the fire, Matilda was busy exercising herself by batting her little woolly koala round the floor in the conservatory, which at any other time would have been amusing, but became even more annoying when somehow she managed to hoick it into the second tier of the free-standing veg rack, and then proceeded to try and clamber in after it. Having evicted her and retrieved her toy for her, I settled down to try and finally get on with some work. I put ZZ Top on very loud, at almost pain-threshold level, and refused to answer the door for the rest of the day.

Tuesday brought with it a clutch of couriers, the first one of whom pulled off the door handle. While I was sitting there mending it again, three other couriers arrived, one to collect and two deliveries, and the coalman came and delivered the winter order. I was surprised that they’d made it with that delivery, because when I’d rung up and placed the order, the woman at the coal yard said it had been going totally manic ever since the BBC weather man had mentioned the possibility of snow. I felt slightly guilty for adding to her workload, because it was precisely that which had spurred me on to ringing them, as well.

Yesterday the soundtrack to my determination to get down to work had been ZZ Top, today it was Tom Waits, and I was struck by that line in “Heartattack and Vine” where he sings:

“Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, that’s just God when he’s drunk”

- a line which I felt rang very true, this week. In the afternoon, I was visited by the chief head honcho of the Occupational Therapists, who was to conduct a review of my progress, or lack of it. It turns out that my legs may well be permanently bent, unless I have either botox and/or an operation, well, one on each leg, actually, which may well then not have as positive an outcome as hoped, because at the end of the day, what’s to stop me ending up back in the same state afterwards. She did make some comments and suggestions which might be worth following up, such as Quinine Sulphate tablets for the pain and cramps, which I now have to follow up with my GP. All of which left me feeling a bit gloomy, to be honest.

I decided I needed a blast of positivism, logical or otherwise, so this time I put on Keith Marsden singing “Prospect Providence” a song which makes its chorus out of a litany of all the Mills that used to stand in Marsden’s home town of Morley.

“Prospect, Providence, Perseverance, Albert, Valley and Crank;
I served me time in the dust and grime, with never a word of thanks
Oh the wages were poor and the hours were long and the gaffers was hard, lads, hard;
But the last time’s coming thank God coming soon, when I’ll walk up that damn mill yard!”

This doesn’t sound like a particularly positive song, and it probably isn’t, all things being told, but I view it as such because of the resonances it has with my own life. I have walked up that damn mill yard for the last time, or to be more accurate, the damn mill yard has come to me. So that was Tuesday.

Wednesday, however, brought better news, in that the Government has finally, at last, caved in to common sense and postponed the badger cull. This was actually quite a sneaky move, because by doing so, they had headed off a potential embarrassment in the debate which had been forced in Parliament on Thursday, and in which it looked certain that they would be defeated. However, a victory by any means is still a victory, and the postponement gives another six months or so to argue for the cull to be abandoned altogether. What staggered me, though, was the reason advanced for the ban, that there were many more badgers than Defra had realised, so culling 70% of them would not be physically possible in the time available this year!

So, it turns out that a cull which was proposed for political reasons, in the face of scientific evidence that it wouldn’t work, which the government’s own spokesman admitted on BBC Radio 4 that they didn’t know whether it would work or not, was in any case hoist on the petard of there being far more badgers than Defra realised. It really does take the concept of “shambles” to a whole new level, and maybe next time we should get Fred Karno’s Army in to do it – the result would probably be slightly more organised, and certainly funnier than leaving it to a combination of Defra and the farmers.

By now, of course, it had somehow become Thursday without me noticing, the way busy weeks do, and I was still bathing in the warm satisfaction of the afterglow of the badger cull being postponed when this time, I pulled the damn door handle off, when closing the door after coming back in with some coal. Fortunately, after all the practice this week, I can now put it back together in a couple of minutes, in the same way that those display teams used to do with the field guns at the Royal Military Tattoo.

By now, it was Thursday evening and Deb had limped home, exhausted, for the start of half-term, with the news that it sounded like “something was scraping” underneath the camper van. So that, I think, is next week’s problem, though it may well be the one that stops us going up to Dumfries and Galloway for a couple of days in the vehicle in question, if push comes to shove, as the time will have to be spent, instead, on making it roadworthy and safe for Debbie’s navigation of the mountain passes between here and Stalybridge, high on a hill with a lonely goat turd, yeay odleeay odle-lee.

Friday also saw the arrival of Freddie and Zak, who have come to stay over half-term while Granny makes one of her regular royal progresses down to the Solent to visit various children, inlaws, aunties and nephews with birthdays. Matilda greeted both dogs by hissing at them in a friendly manner then going behind the sofa and growling, though she is actually getting used to them to the stage where she now largely ignores them unless they look at her, at which point she goes into the cat version of the full Robert de Niro “You lookin’ at me?” routine.

Anyway, we all settled down to a state of armed neutrality verging on mutual assured destruction, and, because I am working on this book of my Grandma’s wartime recipes, I was entertaining the dogs by singing “Run, Rabbit, Run” to them while I worked, especially the line about Friday is rabbit-pie day. Freddie gets quite excited when you mention rabbits, in fact the only word that gets him more exercised is “squirrel”, so when I was singing about them, he started looking for these rabbits in the conservatory. I used to know an archaeologist in Nottinghamshire who taught his dog to run off down the garden barking madly if he shouted “Tebbits!” and I tried it on Freddie, with predictable results:

“Freddie! Tebbits! See ‘em off!”

“Woofwoofwoof woof woof!”

Our gay badinage was interrupted by the sound of someone pinging me on Skype on the computer and I saw to my surprise that it was Bernard asking for a friend request! Bernard is 90, or thereabouts, and was in the next bed to me in hospital for several weeks in that dreary autumn of non-recovery in 2010. At the time, he pooh-poohed new technology and he told me that I spent too much time on the internet. Obviously he had now undergone a similar process of conversion to that undergone by Debbie, who once denounced the internet as “a giant electronic anorak” and now spends all her time surfing on Ebay. Anyway, the electronic hologram of Bernard and I had a cosy little chat, and he ended by giving me a demonstration of how he played the harmonica with Dave, his dog “joining in”. Great stuff. I only wished I’d had the presence of mind to record it somehow. No doubt we would have had a doggy choir joining in at this end, as well, were it not for the fact that Grandad had arrived earlier and taken them out walkies. There is something about “free reed” instruments that really drives dogs bonkers, it must be something to do with the type of noise they make.

So, having survived a torrid week, somehow it got to be Saturday, and I still had a list of tasks a yard and a half long – accounts stuff, work on new books, trying to organise for us to go and see Elvis in his foster kennels at Ferrybridge, you name it. By Saturday night, by the time I’d fed everyone and done the washing up, it was all I could do to stay awake long enough to put the clocks back for a much-needed extra hour’s sleep.

Today, when I woke up, my first thought was not that I was feeling much more rested, or even an hour’s worth more rested, but that, were he still with us, this would be my father’s 91st birthday. Can it really be twenty whole years next year since he died? Sadly, it would seem it can. It’s also (though I never knew this when my Dad was alive) the feast of St Jude (not to be confused with Judas Iscariot, or even Jasper Carrott) the patron saint of lost causes. (May I just say, in passing, how supremely organised it is of the church in general to have a patron saint of everything. I’ve remarked before how amazing it would have been to have been present at the meeting where Big G dished them all out, with all the saints who got cats, dogs and guinea pigs smiling smiles of smug self-congratulation, while all the people like Jude who got “lost causes” “women with difficult labours” “boils” or “iguanas” muttering into their beards and looking thunderous.)

St. Jude, known as Thaddaeus, was a brother of St. James the Less, and a relative of, and was one of the 12 Apostles of, Jesus. So at least Big G was keeping it in the family.

Ancient writers tell us that he preached the Gospel in Judea, Samaria, Idumaea, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Lybia. According to Eusebius, he returned to Jerusalem in the year 62, and assisted at the election of his brother, St. Simeon, as Bishop of Jerusalem.

He is an author of an epistle to the Churches of the East, particularly the Jewish converts, directed against the heresies of the Simonians, Nicolaites, and Gnostics.

Jude was the one who asked Jesus at the Last Supper why He would not manifest Himself to the whole world after His resurrection. Little else is known of his life. Legend claims that he visited Beirut and Edessa, and was possibly martyred with St. Simon in Persia.

It seems he had “form” with regard to lost causes and is invoked in desperate situations because his New Testament letter stresses that the faithful should persevere in the environment of harsh, difficult circumstances, just as their forefathers had done before them. He is also frequently pictured, in Icons and religious painting, with his hair on fire and carrying a club. Presumably he is looking to use the club on whoever set his hair on fire, although the alternative explanation is that the flames are a reference to his having been present at the Pentecost.

Certainly, if someone in spiritual authority over me had set my hair on fire (even if only by accident, as a by-product of being visited with the Holy Spirit) handed me a club, and told me that I was in charge of desperate remedies and lost causes, I, too, would probably be churlish and unresponsive. I say this because the only times I have ever seriously prayed to Saint Jude for intercession have been, to allow me to walk again (see under botox, above) and to save Kitty’s life, neither of which happened. There are those, however, who swear by him, as evidenced by the occasional notices thanking him which are published in the broadsheet newspapers by grateful seekers of his help whose prayers have been granted. I realise that it is supposed to be one of the conditions of saying the Novena to St Jude that you promise, should your request be successful, to publish and praise his name, but how can they be so sure that St Jude reads The Daily Telegraph? And how does he read it without setting it alight?

Looking beyond the symbolism, I suppose the lesson we’re meant to get from St Jude is never give up. I don’t know why my prayers weren’t answered on those two specific occasions. Perhaps St Jude tried his best, but it was one of those cases where there ain’t no Devil, but God had a load on that day. Or a hangover. Or perhaps I didn’t pray hard enough, or in the right frame of mind, or whatever. Prayer does, apparently work. There are even random scientific tests where plants that have been prayed over and flourished considerably more than other plants in exactly the same conditions that weren’t. I don’t know. So maybe what we’re supposed to think is that just because prayer doesn’t work sometimes, it doesn’t mean that it won’t work every time, if you can follow my navigation through all the double negatives there.

And to be undaunted. My dad was never daunted, and at his funeral we had “To Be A Pilgrim” with that verse about “who so beset him round, with dismal stories/ do but themselves confound, his strength the more is”. I’d hope to have inherited that from him, at least, even though his engineering genes don’t seem to have been passed on, apart from a peculiar facility for re-attaching handles to doors.

So what am I saying here? Don’t despair, I suppose. We’re heading into that dark tunnel between now and the shortest day, but it will get light again. Like St Jude, I feel that last week I have also undergone a Baptism of Fire, and there are indeed many things in my life and work that can certainly be despaired of. Last year’s sales figures, to name but one. I need to take that spirit forward with me, and maybe also be more like my dad, whose normal response to any domestic engineering disaster would be to simply acknowledge it by saying something like “that’s queer!” and then reach for a screwdriver, his mind already working on how to fix it.

There you go then. St Jude, who can apparently take a sad song, and make it better. Remember to let her into your heart, and me as well, while you’re at it. As Cromwell said, trust in God, but keep your powder dry:

his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;

Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

Anyway. Time to get on with my chores, I guess, and fetch in the coal, before it gets dark at 4pm. Oh, bugger, the handle’s come off. That’s queer!