Category Archives: travel

July 6, 2018 · 10:14 am

Land of the long white cloud

Auckland, with volcanic island Rangitoto across the harbour

A Life – Another instalment of my autobiography until I revert to my normal blogs

  I searched the world for an egalitarian English- speaking country. Canada was too cold. Australia meant living in another large crowded city in order to find a job. So I explored New Zealand – reading its history written by well- known historian Keith Sinclair. On learning from it that women had had the vote since 1893, that back then employers were required to provide a seat for shop girls to sit on if they needed to, and that the two- day weekend for everyone to spend with their families was the norm, I decided this was the place.

It sounded a kind and old- fashioned society. Which it was, and that didn’t seem a dis-advantage. I began reading NZ newspapers at the FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club) trying to get a feel for this new country.  I found that the city nearest the equator which would be big enough to have a newspaper that would employ women was Auckland.

I had no money for our air fares so went to see the Dean of S John’s Cathedral to see if their fund for distressed gentlewomen could help. He directed me to the British Legion, who generously covered all our fares and expenses. It galled me that they did so because my father and ex-husband had been in the army rather than because I had been, but I swallowed my pride, and thanked them for their largesse.

Just before we left, my ex-husband back in England, placed an injunction on me to prevent me leaving with the children. This involved another expensive legal action and employing an enormously expensive counsel this time.

At a conference before the case, the pompous and rather arrogant counsel began by telling me not to speak unless spoken to, and to answer his questions with a yes or no. Towards the end, he had picked up so many false trails that I broke his rules and butted in and put the facts chronologically as he needed them. He sounded irritated and asked why I hadn’t said all this in the first place and couldn’t see that he’d created the situation by treating me like a half-wit.

The case was heard in chambers, with the same judge from my divorce, who once again decided the course of my life without even looking in my direction as I sat at the other end of the table. Unusually he gave me custody, care and control, a rare decision which the British High Commission in Wellington declined to believe a few years later when I applied for a separate passport for the children so they could visit their father back in England. The logic of applying for a passport to send them to their father if I’d kidnapped them in the first place defied me. But harassment was such a normal state of affairs for women in those days that many, like me, took it for granted, and just worked around it.

I could only afford to pay for the minimum sized box, four cubic feet, in which to pack our belongings. I ordered it five foot by four by three, to accommodate a favourite picture, painted by Chinese school children. It was called ‘House Under the Moon’, and later, a friend who was curator of various well- known art galleries said that if an adult had painted it, it would have been a masterpiece.

Besides this treasured picture which I couldn’t bear to leave behind, I packed a pair of Bokhara rugs, a black lacquer Chinese box containing our china, some silver, an antique mirror, a few other pictures, two Chinese lamps, some carefully culled books, and a pair of bamboo Chinese collapsible bookcases that looked like Hepplewhite designs. I was so ruthless that I’ve since regretted many small things that would easily have fitted in – treasured pieces of china, an art nouveau pewter goblet, good linen. But then, the burning of boats suited my mood.

So I packed up my life, and spent the last day with Pat Hangen. Our plane was delayed by eight hours while another plane was fished out of the harbour at the end of the runway at Kaitak. Landing or leaving this fabled island was always dangerous – flying between tenement blocks and drying laundry to land or take -off.

I had never really come to terms with life here. In Victoria, the heart of the rich bustling city, a newspaper seller had a pitch outside Lane Crawford, the Harrods of Hong King. The windows just behind him were tastefully arranged with fabulous diamond encrusted jewellery; and I discovered that he and his wife and children lived and slept on the pavement under his newspaper stall.

Yes, I tried to assuage my western conscience by delivering clothes and blankets. But the shocking gaps between haves and have-nots, especially in the cold winters, bothered me as much as cruelty to children and animals still do…  Now, as we flew out on the second of August 1970, I peered down at the lights of Hong Kong and the places we’d grown to know so well in the last four years.

Deepwater Bay, Repulse Bay, Stanley Bay. These were the places in which we had lived. In each one, I was always conscious, over twenty years after the events, of the battles fought in these places by the defenders against the terrifying Japanese army. Deepwater Bay was where the Japanese landed to cut off the defenders from each other on Hong Kong island. I knew the very spot at Repulse Bay, where two British soldiers swam for it, and got to Stanley Point, only to be killed in the massacres there.

I used to look up at the woods behind the Repulse Bay Hotel and wonder where the drain was where the women and children had tried to seek safety from the bullets. And I never drove to Stanley Point and past the site of St Stephen’s College without remembering the slaughter of the patients and doctors there, the rape and murder of the nurses.

Wongneichong Gap no longer exists. The cliff face and rock formation have long since been demolished to make way for a wider road. But whenever I drove through it then, either forking right to Deepwater Bay or straight ahead for Repulse Bay I paid homage to the Canadians who made their last stand against the Japanese there, and fought with such incredible bravery to the last man. It felt sometimes as though they were still there, I was so conscious of their ghostly presence.

The memories of the signing of the surrender on Christmas Day had been briskly banished from the unchanging Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon across the harbour. Yet the few trees left in Victoria, on Hong Kong island, still bore the marks of the dreadful barrage of artillery from the Japanese across the water. They were riddled still with shrapnel, but somehow were bravely surviving a worse battle now against traffic and fumes.

We landed in our new country among green fields dotted with white sheep. Driving into Auckland in the middle of the antipodean winter, gardens were blooming with daffodils and camellias, jasmine and purple lasiandra bushes. It seemed like paradise.

The journey had been an unexpected ordeal. My friendly doctor had given us all our injections but had forgotten to sign the documents. When we landed in Brisbane in the freezing dawn at six o clock, the elderly and obstructive airport doctor discovered this – but refusing to even look at our weeping smallpox vaccinations as proof, sent us back to the plane under armed guard, to the astonishment not only of me, but the other passengers.

At Sydney I thought I’d avoid the hassle and stay on the plane for the stopover. Alas, it was not to be… after a long delay on landing, a posse of armed police boarded the plane, and announced over the loudspeaker that I was to report to them with my children. Struggling through the now irritable standing passengers with their luggage, waiting to leave the plane, we were marched off and put in a freezing room.

August in Hong Kong is hot, hot and this was frosty mid-winter in Sydney. In spite of our warm clothes we were all shivering with cold – and in my case with fear. Finally, after nearly half an hour I opened the door in a rage, and found an armed guard standing in front of me. How long am I going to be kept here I asked. It’s not my business to say he replied. I have never felt so utterly powerless.

Then a doctor arrived, young and reasonable, looked at our arms and sores, laughed and said it was all a storm in a tea-cup, and we were allowed to board the plane, this time unescorted. Halfway across the Tasman, checking our documents for arrival in Auckland, I realised that the Sydney doctor hadn’t signed the medical documents either.

It never crossed my law-abiding mind to sign them myself, so positioning myself at the back of the queue this time, I went through another hostile interrogation on landing in Auckland, and ended up bursting into tears when one of the truculent officials demanded “Well, where’s your husband?” “I haven’t got one,” I wept and they let me through.

More trials awaited me at customs, where our three suitcases contained not just clothes but sheets and towels and cutlery! Coming from Hong Kong, customs were sure I must have muddy shoes or other dangerous items covered in bacteria which would pollute this pristine place. Finally, a friend of a Hong Kong friend who had said he’d meet my plane, was actually waiting for us, even though I’d only met him once.

The tired children were as good as gold and sat in the back seat of his car amid the eight fringed legs, two fiercely wagging tails and the panting jaws of his two golden retrievers. John was a bachelor, and it never crossed his mind that we were exhausted, so he drove us all over his city in the fading twilight, to show us beauty spots and architectural delights, before taking us to his flat on the fringes of the city. His father had just died, so instead of leaving us at a hotel as I’d expected, he lent us his flat while he stayed with his bereaved stepmother.

Frightened though I was by the experience of landing in a new country, with no money, no home, no job, and no friends, it felt as though the tide was turning. I seemed to have found a generous and kind friend already.

The next day, having lit the fire, switched on the lamps, got the children settled at the dining table, enjoying a properly cooked supper, and a low happy babble of conversation filling the comfortable room, John arrived.  I could see he just loved the idea of being welcomed home, offered a drink, and entertained by two lively children. He stayed for hours, with me once again on the brink of exhaustion.  Meanwhile his dogs had begun what became a regular routine for some years. They trotted through to the bedroom where the children were tucked up, and checked they were alright before rejoining us. Life began to seem rather sweet.

The next day, his neighbour, who was a journalist, gave me the names of the people to apply to for a job at the two main Auckland newspapers. I still have the envelope on which she scrawled the names and phone numbers. One of the names eventually became my second husband. After meeting the children, she also asked to use them for a television programme about taking children to the zoo, as their clear articulate voices meant they were ideal for her purposes – local children mumbled, she said!

John’s best friend also arrived with John and being in the car business helped me buy a second- hand car on hire purchase, a necessity in a huge city with minimal public transport. Thus equipped, I turned up for my two job interviews. The worst part of this was knowing no-one with whom to leave the two five and six- year- old children. So I parked on the top floor of a quiet car park.

Torn between the fear of them being kidnapped if I left the car door unlocked, or trapped inside the car if I locked it and there was a fire, I straddled both nightmares. I left them with a picnic- cream buns and chocolate biscuits- and left the car unlocked, telling them if there was a fire, to go to the edge of the car park, lean over and yell fire. I then made my way un-easily to my job interviews.

To be continued

 Food for threadbare gourmets

 Friends arrived unexpectedly for drinks, one of them allergic to gluten in a big way. My usual standby – rice crackers – seemed stale, so I had to improvise. I sliced a potato very thinly, fried the slices in olive oil, and used them as a base for smoked salmon and cream cheese, while the rest of us consumed gluten packed blinis. I made a good helping of garlicky aoli, to eat with sticks of celery, courgettes and carrots -that did for us all – and along with a plate of olives, gherkins, and cubes of cheddar cheese and a lovely bottle of Reisling, we managed !

Food for thought

Outside the open window

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Richard Wilber

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Filed under colonial life, cookery/recipes, family, history, The Sound of Water, Thoughts on writing and life, travel, uncategorised, Uncategorized, world war two

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April 27, 2018 · 5:21 pm

A heroine, an eccentric, a Muslim attack and a paradise

Image result for la times muslim sultans torchlight birthday parade

A life – another instalment of my autobiography before I revert to my normal blogs

The last holidays were spent in Kota Bahru, where my father had been exiled after another stoush with another commanding officer. In his game of snakes and ladders with his career, he was heading towards the top of the ladder again, when he landed on a snake, picked an unnecessary and unreasonable point of principle with the colonel, and slithered down the board again, missing out on a medal, ending up with a mere mention in dispatches and a posting as far away from the regiment as possible.

Kota Bahru, up on the east coast near what was then the Siamese border, was idyllic, with long, unspoiled beaches edged with casuarina trees, and gaily -painted fishermen’s boats lined up beneath them. The men wore piratical- looking turbans in bright oranges and reds and blues, and the women’s clothes were richly- coloured unlike the drab, brown batiks of the sarongs on the rest of the Malayan peninsula. Thanks to a mixed Siamese/ Malay heritage, the women here were famed for their beauty, combining the voluptuousness of the Malay with the sculptured bone structure of what are known as Thais now.

We lived in a pink stucco house near the mouth of the river, some way out of the town, and not far from the airfield which had seen hard fighting when the Japanese landed. The house looked across at a peaceful little kampong beneath the trees. Great clumps of purple water hyacinth often drifted slowly down river, and we watched the bronzed, brown bodies of children jumping and playing in the water. Early in the morning, or at dusk, the girls would stand and discreetly bathe beneath their sarongs, and their grandfather sat and fished all day, a still, meditative figure across the water.

The house still bore the machine gun holes from twelve years before when the Japanese had made their sudden appearance from the sea at dawn in December 1941. The hub of the community we were now part of, was the Kelantan Club, where Europeans gathered to meet each other. They were a mix of the local judge and policemen, diplomats and doctors, nurses and rubber planters, and representatives of various historic far eastern trading houses.

The rubber planters had mostly lived here since before the war, and were in many ways, thirtyish Somerset Maugham characters. They had all been interned together at Changi Camp in Singapore during the war, and those who had survived were a close -knit band of brothers.

There was Ted Kurtain, famous for swearing, whose waterfall and rock pool was a favourite picnic spot for the favoured few, including us. His closest friend was a dignified quiet man, Hugh Jackson, who had had a Thai mistress for nineteen years before the Japanese came. She waited for him during the war years he spent in Changi, and they were re-united when he came back to his rubber plantation.

Deaf to the misgivings of his well- connected English family, he sent his mistress to a Swiss finishing school, and then married her. On visits to his spacious bungalow, filled with books and English china and antiques, she entertained us as though it was an English country house party. She was beautiful, dignified, her grooming immaculate, and exquisitely dressed.

Alf, one of the two eccentric local police chiefs, had a head as bald as Yul Brynner’s, and underneath his intimidating exterior was a gentle, kind and lonely man. When his mandatory leaves came around every three years, he took a boat to Aden where he disembarked and bought a flock of goats. These he would drive north up the Arabian Peninsula, using the goats as food and currency, and when he reached Port Said took a boat to Liverpool.

Here he would spend a fortnight with his sister before returning to his post in the East. The other police chief was a much younger Englishman who had converted to the Muslim faith and kept his distance from we alcoholic and godless infidels!

As well as the Kelantan Club, the other meeting place was the Palm Court Hotel, a complete contrast to the old wooden club house with its planter’s chairs and rattan furniture. Palm Court was all concrete and tiles and chrome, and run by Mammy, a giant White Russian lady in late middle age. She wore ankle length caftans before they had been invented, had frizzy, short hair and thick pebble spectacles. But behind her facade of jolliness, I noticed loneliness and sadness.

When writing a blog, I pieced together the remarkable story of this unusual woman. Luba Ruperti was a White Russian born in 1896. She fled with her parents from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918 via Shanghai to the safety of British Singapore, after her sister had been killed by a revolutionary mob.

In those years before the war, Luba would have felt safe in this seemingly impregnable British colony. She married a Russian rotter, who bankrupted them both and left her. Then after their grim appearance in Kelantan, the Japanese reached Singapore, and in that mayhem of murder and bombings, killing of patients in hospital beds, raping of nurses, and killing of all Chinese, somehow Luba got to the dock and managed to board SS Kuala. It was overloaded with five hundred or so other women, children and babies, including a number of Australian and New Zealand nurses.

The next day the Japanese sank the ship, setting it on fire and mothers threw their children overboard trying to get them into the rafts below. As women and children struggled in the sea, wounded, bleeding, drowning, trying to hold onto rafts and floating debris, the Japanese machine-gunned them in the water.

Those who survived terrible thirst, hunger, horrendous wounds, madness and burning sun to make it to shore, were machine gunned in the water and as they staggered over rocks and up the beach into the shelter of the trees. They had reached Pom Pong Island which had no food, and only a tiny source of fresh water, after three hours in the sea. “My fat be blessed for that!” Luba told a reporter after the war.

A few days later the SS Tandjong Pinang arrived at Pom Pong Island from Sumatra to rescue the small band of between a hundred and a hundred and fifty survivors from the original five hundred. Hardly had they embarked than the Japanese were back, and sank this ship too. Luba was one of only handful of survivors of this second disaster.

The few the Japanese captured on shore ended up suffering and usually dying in the terrible conditions of internment. Luba got away, and somehow ended up in India, via Ceylon, where she made her living cooking for thousands of U.S. troops in Delhi, before returning to Singapore after the war.

While in India, in February 1943, Luba gave her great gift to all those who had died, suffered or survived. She had compiled a long list of the names of the people who had boarded the SS Kuala at Singapore and who had survived to board the SS Tandjong Pindang. In the chaos and panic during the bombing of the docks in Singapore as frantic passengers tried to board the ship, no records had been taken.

No-one knew who had boarded, escaped, drowned or survived. Families would never have known if their loved ones were still alive in some corner of the world. Luba must have started compiling her lists during their terrible ordeal on Pom Pong island, as there was no way otherwise that she could have known so comprehensively who was there.

It was an act not just of heroism in those hellish days, but of responsibility and altruism in conditions when it could very well have been everyone for himself. Her act of witnessing and recording rescued both the dead and the living from oblivion, telling their story – a story that no one else was able to share with the world for another three years when the war ended, when a pitifully small handful of survivors could then tell of their sufferings.

In an archival story I found a reference to her being back in Singapore by 1958, and by the mid-1960’s nearing seventy, she was: “utterly dependent for her living by making and selling exquisite dolls dressed in the costumes of old Russia, complete with tiny earrings, bracelets and rings on the dolly fingers,” according to quotes from a story in the Singapore Straits Times. The same archival entry comments that: “she appears at this stage of her life to have been still the exuberant woman who had lived through so much fear, chaos and loss without losing her innate spirit”.

This feisty open-hearted woman… who never seemed to be defeated by the perils and tragedies of her extraordinary odyssey from Czarist Russia to post- Colonial Malaya, via Shanghai, Singapore, Indonesia, India and back to Singapore, surviving death, abandonment and poverty, loneliness, bombings, torpedoed ships and dangerous journeys was the person most people thought was a joke.

But in spite of Mammy’s joyful welcome at the Palm Court, most people preferred the relaxed, slightly ramshackle atmosphere of the Kelantan Club. Everyone turned up for the weekly cinema show on Friday when an old black and white film was shown on an ancient and not very efficient projector.

On Saturday nights, we enjoyed Scottish dancing, and there was a full complement of balls to mark every possible occasion. At Christmas I was asked to paint two huge festive murals on the walls, with red-coated Father Christmas, reindeers, sleighs, snow and the rest.

The most enjoyable part of this creative endeavour was at lunchtime when all the chaps would drop by to chat and share a fresh lime with me… to be the only unmarried female under forty in a town crammed with young men was a fate worth enjoying! None of these nice young men ever crossed the line with a naive and ignorant seventeen- year -old schoolgirl and they treated me with respect and consideration.

By contrast, one evening we left our peaceful riverside to go into Kota Bahru and watch the colourful Sultan’s Birthday Torchlight procession. My small fair- haired brother sat on my father’s shoulders so he could see. When we’d finished watching we turned to go back to the car, and as we pushed our way through the tight throng of mostly Malay men I felt a slight ripple as though they were converging on us. With my brother high on my father’s shoulders acting as a beacon, they pressed up against us as we struggled along in single file, my father, I think, unaware of what was happening behind him. My stepmother clung to him and behind her, I clutched her hand tightly.

I became the focus of this angry hostile crowd. They had hands and knowing fingers so hard I felt I was being punched as they prodded, pinched and poked me, finding soft places that no-one had ever found before. I was terrified and humiliated at the same time. When we got to the car and out of the melee I was too shocked and shamed to mention this ordeal to my parents.

It was only fifty years later, yarning with my brother, that I talked for the first time of what had felt like a shocking and unprovoked attack by angry hostile Muslims… was it my sex, my race or my religion which provoked it – or all three?

One memorable day the British Resident invited us to join him and General Bourne to sail out to the deserted Perhentian Islands. Thousands of brilliantly coloured and richly patterned tiny tropical fish swirled through the clear turquoise waters, so clear that thirty feet deep looked like three. A solitary fisherman climbed a coconut palm for us to drink the ice- cold coconut milk in the heart of the great green globe. No other soul was there. It seemed like the most beautiful place on earth, untouched, unspoiled, a pristine, perfect paradise.

Yet now, it’s impossible to find a photo of the islands which doesn’t have hotels and boats and people and jumbled sand from footsteps on every silver beach. Shortly after this idyll, we returned to Penang and the Runnymede, which felt like home, before setting sail for England in a Blue Funnel ship, where we enjoyed utter luxury once more.

I look at old photos of that time and the memories return so vividly – my stepmother wearing a purple linen dress which looked wonderful with her black hair and pale skin, sitting in a rattan chair chatting to charming Tungku Abdul Rahman, the ‘father’ of Merdeka. They both held the inevitable cigarette between their fingers, he with his de rigueur glass of orange juice for a Muslim in the other hand, the orange juice fortified, my stepmother told me with a laugh, with a big slug of whisky.

There’s my father, hot, tired and unkempt, squatting on a beer box in the jungle stripped to the waist, about to eat his bread and cheese and drink his beer, the food he had dropped into the jungle instead of army rations… nearby butterflies hovered over the sweaty socks he’d just taken off, savouring the delicious pheromones.

And my small half- brother and I, me standing to attention in a new dress I was so thrilled with, at a parade on the padang at Kota Bahru, and he, sitting cross-legged at my feet, looking puzzled, not sure what he was supposed to be doing.

Penang is like most thriving eastern cities these days… as busy, crowded, built up and polluted as any western city – no longer the elegant peaceful place I once knew. Yet back then as we sailed away from Penang, and it faded into the misty blue distance my heart hurt so much that I couldn’t bear to say good-bye to all that beauty, and I promised myself I would return. But I never have.

To be continued

 Food for threadbare gourmets

Re-cycling is one of my favourite hobbies, whether it’s re-cycling from the rubbish tip or leftovers from the fridge. In this case, I had a cup of leek and potato soup left over from the day before. Waste not, want not – I checked out a pea soup recipe, and found that leeks were one of the  ingredients.

I also had a big cup of steamed cauliflower in the fridge, so tipping it into the soup, I added a good gob of garlic from a jar, a couple of cups of good chicken stock, salt and pepper, and when hot, two cups of frozen peas. When the peas were cooked in a few minutes, I whizzed it all smooth in the stick blender, and hey presto, we enjoyed a delicious pea soup that took only five minutes or so to cook.

I love croutons that always cheer up a soup, but didn’t have any good sour dough bread for them, only soft white sliced sandwich bread bought for sandwiches. I simply cut a slice into four and fried the pieces in olive oil. Sprinkled with salt, they were better than croutons, crunchy and satisfying.

Food for thought

Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life…

Elizabeth Goudge , writer

 

 

 

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Filed under army, colonial life, cookery/recipes, history, Japan, life and death, the thirties, Thoughts on writing and life, travel, uncategorised, Uncategorized, world war two

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April 21, 2018 · 2:24 pm

Tropical learning curves

15

A life – another instalment of my autobiography before I revert to my normal blogs

We sometimes played hockey on the padang at Tanah Rata, the nearby township where I quickly learned to play on the wing after my first attempt at playing centre. As we bullied with our hockey sticks in the slight dip where water had collected, my legs became covered with small red leeches. Trying to prise these horrifying bloodsuckers off was a practical demonstration of the phrase ‘he stuck to him like a leech.’

I also played fast and furious tennis with three teachers (one who had been a Junior Wimbledon champion) who needed a fourth on Saturday afternoons, and as head girl started the school magazine; I made a wonderfully arrogant and stupid Lady Catherine de Burgh in the school play of Pride and Prejudice, arranged the flowers for church every week, and ignored various nice boys (in retrospect) who tried to get my interest.

My best friend and I also enjoyed infuriating two young but frumpy teachers who we knew thought we were bumptious and too big for our boots. Apart from this friendship with my best friend which has lasted our life-times, the greatest gift I took away from this school was the ability to write clearly.

The man who tried to teach me to write was a very patrician academic, who wrote book reviews for The Times and was also an army officer. He was our charismatic headmaster – tall, elegant, witty and charming. He didn’t normally teach but he decided to coach me himself for the newly introduced A levels.

I quickly discovered that I was a sloppy thinker, with very little idea of how to write. This uncomfortable realisation hit me after my first essay, when I referred to ‘the naked truth’. Robin (I learned to call him this later) made me look up the meaning of the word ‘naked’ in the dictionary, and it was a lesson I never needed to learn again – to make sure I actually knew the meaning of a word before I used it and forget about clichés!

He taught me to write short simple sentences, to use short Anglo -Saxon words, and never pompous, pretentious Latin words. He’d say chuck instead of throw and tried to teach me not just to write good direct prose, but to think for myself too, and once when I had written an obsequious essay on Anthony and Cleopatra, he teasingly wrote at the bottom: “Beware too slavish an adulation of the Bard!”

The best training he gave me was to write a précis nearly every day, of a piece of weighty Elizabethan or Restoration prose, reducing each piece to a third of its length. It was a rigorous exercise, which trained me to express meaning in the most efficient and simplest way. It taught me to understand the meaning of words so I could translate them into a simpler briefer version and sharpened up my whole writing style. And that was it – the nuts and bolts of writing.

When I hear or read of people’s experiences with gifted teachers today, I marvel at the creative opportunities they have; but on the other hand, these simple rules he gave me have been a useful scaffolding on which to build a writing life. Yes, I missed out on the metaphors and similes, and creative flights of fancy. I just had simple guide-lines for communicating clearly, with no tiresome tics of speech or writing, no frills or clichés, no worn-out phrases, un-necessary words, purple passages or exhibitionist long words.

I learned to write truthfully, and to avoid sentimentality – I think! And this for me, is still the challenge of writing, over half a century later; truth means finding the exact word with no compromises, which means knowing how I truly feel.

Every holidays, I seemed to go back to a different house or hotel. One Easter, my parents met me at the station, and I was whisked back to the rest house at Port Dickson, situated right on the beach. We spent a week here, with the usual routine of lazy morning, tea and bananas served after siesta, shower and change for dinner, dinner, post -prandial stroll along the empty moonlit sands, before moving to Malacca and a government bungalow on a cliff edge outside the town.

It was a big, two-story house with magnificent views. At night, looking out over the sea, and up into the clear night sky, my father pointed out to me the North Star and the Southern Cross in the same starry sky as we stood almost on the equator.

Malacca by daylight had the charm which was missing from every other Malayan town. The Malayan kampongs in jungle clearings were attractive, traditional communities constructed from indigenous materials, wood and coconut leaves, and composed of small groups of dwelling places on stilts. By contrast, the towns were simply concrete shells with shops in the bottom usually owned by Chinese merchants, and crude dwellings over the shop.

Garish signs and raucous music from the radio were also elements of these depressing environments. To enter these un-attractive townships, or rather, small tropical slums, one ran the gauntlet of terrible smells from rubber factories, and then from durian, a fruit whose smell is legendary. Brave people said it tasted delicious, but few were brave enough to battle past the smell.

Malacca had an architectural European past, both Portuguese and Dutch. The Portuguese buildings, dating from 1511, included the old fortress, parts of which were still standing when we explored in 1954, over four hundred years later. Eventually Protestant Dutch traders arrived in 1641.

The Dutch built much of the old town that remained when I saw it, a little corner of the Netherlands transplanted to the tropics. Fifteen years later, when I stayed in Macau, occupied by the Portuguese in 1557, it too had the same charming atmosphere of an alien architecture dreaming far from home.

But whereas Macau was Portuguese and Mediterranean, and the architecture had a certain suitability for the climate, the little Dutch red-tiled buildings were derived from a northern style designed to keep the warmth in. It was strangely incongruous in the humid sunshine of the old sea-port, by then silted up, trade gone and only Malayan fishing boats crowding the moorings.

The British got here in 1795, and in spite of the modern tendency to sneer at all colonial activities, the policy of the British then was to preserve the sultanates, the Muslim faith and the Malay way of life, and those aspects of Malayan life still dominate the modern country of Malaysia today.  We visited the Malacca museum and listened to a music box playing Mozart which Dutch exiles would have heard nearly two hundred years before, admired the Dutch-built church, now Anglican, the old Dutch government offices, and explored intriguing little shops for jewellery and non-existent treasures.

In the afternoons while every-one else slept, I read dog-eared orange and cream -covered Penguin books left behind by previous visitors, including the unforgettable Ambrose Bierce and, in cheap editions, Helen Waddell and Mary Webb, Robert Graves and Stefan Zweig. Or I’d play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on 78’s, piling them up on the long central column, so that they plonked down one after the other.

Or I’d walk along the golden, empty sands below and swim, till one day I foolishly swam half a mile out to a fish trap, not realising that it was sited there precisely to catch the current. I slowly became aware that no matter how much I swam, I was getting no nearer the fish trap, but a very long way out to sea.

Trying not to panic, I remembered that to get out of a current you have to swim with it, and across it. It took me over an hour to get back to shore, miles away from the rest-house, pursued, I was quite sure, by sharks. Jack London’s horrible book ‘ The Sea-Wolf’ had already made an indelible impression on me. That afternoon, it haunted me, with every splash of my tired feet probably being the snap of a shark’s jaws. Once back at the rest-house, I kept this escapade to myself.

The next holiday was spent in an army quarter in Mentekab, a garrison built in the middle of a clearing in the jungle, it seemed. Now, I felt I had finally emerged as an adult. I was sixteen, and one of the subalterns in the regiment asked my father if he could take me out. I didn’t know him at all, apart from a dance the previous week, but I jumped at this opportunity for my first grownup date.

The day arrived, and so did he. My stepmother had provided us with a picnic basket. He drove to Temerloh, where we embarked in a long Malayan rowing boat, and he rowed us down the wide, muddy brown river edged with endless palm trees down to the water’s edge. Mile after mile was the same.

Two complete strangers faced each other in the boat, with nothing to even remark on as the miles slipped past. I sat, apparently entranced, as he described in a self- conscious monotone, stories about Japanese opera which he had seen while on leave in Tokyo. Now I’ve seen some myself, I’m even more amazed that he should have bothered to watch. The women’s magazines I had read said that men liked girls who listened to them, and who hung on their words.

They also said men liked a touch of white at the neck, and the daisy- fresh look of white gloves. No hope of that in this dripping heat, alas. I sweltered in a tight, waist- cinching, fashionable, elastic waspie, and a frou of frilly white petticoat I’d made myself – all the rage in northern climates, but as unsuitable for the tropics as the Victorian crinolines and Edwardian bustles of previous memsahibs and missies in this sticky climate.

The young man suddenly spied a small patch of what passed for grass in this part of the world and rowed across to it. By the time we had tied up, spread the prickly wool tartan rug, undone the flask and poured the hot tea which brought out fresh beads of sweat on brow and upper lip, the inhabitants of the nearest kampong had materialised and stood around us in a circle, giggling and chattering in Malay.

They must have thought we were deaf, or that they couldn’t be heard in a foreign language, for they called out to friends who hadn’t yet arrived, and generally carried on as though we were the afternoon’s entertainment. As we were. They were obviously deeply interested in European courting rituals, observing every bite of our picnic, and commenting loudly to each other on our every movement.

Finally, I opened the raffia box in which my stepmother had tastefully packed an iced chocolate cake and started back horrified as a horde of ants tumbled out with it.

At this, we abandoned the whole expedition and followed by waves of what felt like derisive laughter from the indigenous peoples, made our way painfully back up the river. At the other end, my father was waiting mischievously with his speciality, dinner of spaghetti Bolognaise made with the longest spaghetti he could find – extremely difficult to eat with dignity, his subtle plan to embarrass the poor young man and sabotage an occasion which was already an anti-climax to put it kindly.

To be continued

 Food for threadbare gourmets

I love Caesar salad, but don’t like bought Caesar dressings. This dressing is worth the little extra effort for a delicious salad.

Place the following ingredients in a stick blender: one egg yolk, one tbsp Dijon mustard, two to three cloves crushed garlic, one small chopped shallot, four or five chopped anchovies fillets, and the juice of one lime. I use a lemon if I haven’t got a lime. Gradually add 75ml oil –  extra virgin olive oil and canola oil mixed, and continue to blend. When thick stir in a few handfuls of finely grated  Parmesan.

If you have time, make the dressing ahead and let it sit for a while so the flavours meld together.

 Food for thought

 “When a relationship stops working, it usually means that someone has grown.
Someone is now ready to receive more and have more than the relationship offers.
Someone is ready to be loved, honoured, and treated the way they really want to be treated. Could that someone be you?”

~ Iyanla Vanzant

 

 

 

 

 

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September 9, 2017 · 1:49 pm

Tour de France

Image result for french chateaus

 

France in 1950 was unspoilt by either holidaymakers or tourists. I was there to spend a month with friends, and improve my French.

Alex, the son of the friends, came to stay with us first, a sophisticated fourteen- year -old who bullied me, took shameless advantage of my literal interpretation of my father’s instructions to be a good hostess, and used me as dogsbody, maid and batman all in one. After one of our regular rows he came downstairs from his room and his dictionary, and in front of my parents announced to me: ” You are ‘aughty, arrogant and proud.”

Coming from a quiet Yorkshire country town, Paris seemed a massive city of radiant light and celebration. Looking down from the family home in the heart of the city, I watched rainbows of light rolling along the wide roads, as hundreds of cars sped round the boulevards.

Having a bath that night was an ordeal in which I seemed to be accompanied by a crowd as my reflection followed me round a huge, mirrored bathroom. The flat was empty except for a resident maid and the chauffeur who was to drive us down to the chateau. It was huge and overwhelming and Alex was more arrogant than ever. It seemed that his father hadn’t briefed him on being a good host.

However, the next day, he and the chauffeur took me on a whirl around Paris – Notre Dame, cavernous and crowded and Catholic. I was disappointed. I had expected the sacred silence of empty Anglican cathedrals, but this was bustling with chattering people treating the place like their home, and selling souvenirs at stalls by the door. Twelve-year old-righteousness remembered stalls being overturned in another temple.

Today, of course, every Anglican cathedral in England  bustles with tourists too, the whispers and commentaries coiling up the perpendicular arches, and bouncing off the roof and coming back down magnified a million times. But in Notre Dame that day they managed to pray amidst the din.

From the steps of the cathedral we drove past the Louvre, circled the Arc de Triomphe and ended up at the Eiffel Tower – which turned out to be closed on Sundays. It didn’t matter – Paris in summer, nearly seventy years ago, was a beautiful, fragrant city, where people lounged outside on the pavements beneath the trees, and where, when we walked beside the Seine in the sun-shine, it was uncrowded and peaceful.

After lunch, I persuaded Alex to show me how to get out of the flat, and wandered onto the streets, looking for a bookstall. A terrible thought had suddenly wriggled into my consciousness. I had nothing to read! The worst thing that could happen to me! At a corner shop, my eyes raced over the shelves as the full horror of my situation became clear. Everything was literally a closed book- it was all in French. I came out with the only two English language publications in the shop- a copy of Life magazine, which was mostly pictures, and the August 1950 copy of Reader’s Digest, a magazine I’d never seen before.

Though I soon became bored with its banal, monotonous, uniform prose, I read it regularly for the next month, until I knew most of it by heart. I read ad nauseam about some chap called Billy Graham and how he had met and married his sweetheart, ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met’ finally palled, the jokes got worse as the month went by, but ‘How To Improve Your Word Power’ was a winner, I got a hundred per cent before the month was out.

The first reading got me through the evening in Paris, and the next morning we set off for Vienne. Our destination at the chateau was everything that a romantic, unformed imagination could have visualised. We approached it down a long avenue of ancient trees. Those which had succumbed to old age had been chopped down to a height of three feet, hollowed out, and planted with foaming pink geraniums spilling out over the stumps.

The chateau was a moated, ivy-covered, turreted, thirteenth century family home. The moat had been filled in with sand, where the smaller children played. Where the drawbridge had once been, there was now a wide bridge leading to the iron- studded front door which was always open. From the high, dark hall hung with family portraits and armour and weapons, one door led to the dining room, a very solemn place, and the other to the salon, a light, airy room furnished with a variety of gilt sofas and chairs of different periods, mirrors, and objets d’art, while at the end of the hall, a staircase rose to the family quarters.

All seven brothers and sisters returned every summer with their families for the shooting, and they all had their own family accommodation. Alex and his family had a self-contained flat at the other end of the chateau but I was placed in one of the spare bedrooms of the main chateau, a beautiful room hung with toile de jouy in pale green with its own bathroom. The elegant, shuttered windows were hung around with more ivy, and from it would emerge huge, black, long-legged spiders, bigger and hairier than any English variety that had terrorised me in the bath at home, and which perched themselves on the mouldings in corners of the ceiling.

The ceiling was far too high to reach with a broom and a chair, so Alex and his cousins would troop in every evening with their pop guns and have great sport shooting the hairy beasts. I went to bed every night in this gorgeous room, wondering if I would wake and find another monster had somehow insinuated itself through the shutters and into the hangings round my bed.

Breakfast was taken en famille, and was the one meal of the day I enjoyed, though I didn’t do as they all did, and dip my buttered toast into my bowl of coffee. The bread was freshly baked and brought from the village by one of the maids when she came on duty before breakfast. In the afternoon, another delivery of fresh bread was made by a boy on a bike, and we would eat it for gouter at about three o’clock, we children standing around in the kitchen, illegally eating great slices of this heavenly bread, spread with runny home- made confiture which I called jam.

Those were the good times. Lunch and dinner in the stately main dining room, with at least thirty of us round the enormous, oval table was a long drawn- out ordeal. No allowance was made for an Anglo-Saxon barbarian who was accustomed to eat with a knife and fork. Every course was eaten with a fork only and I fought a losing battle with pastry and delicate vegetable dishes served whole, or legs of chicken and partridge.

My appetite would go before we began these marathon meals, so it was with no pangs that my half-eaten courses were taken away, after I had given up the struggle to keep the food on the plate while I chased it round with the fork. But then a solicitous adult, or maid serving the next course would enquire if I hadn’t enjoyed it, or try to coax me to eat a little more. Neither could I stomach the richness of it all after a life-time of grim war-time English rations.

Every lunch time began with a slice of orange melon. In the beginning, I loved it, but by the end I could scarcely bear the smell of it when the maid placed it in front of me. No-one ever skipped or left a course, so neither could I. The melon was followed by vegetable courses or soup, and then the meat course. I hated the meat on its own without the vegetables, it tasted too rich for my austere war-time palate. After cheese and fruit, we would have what everyone else considered a great delicacy. It was called fromage blanc. It looked like whipped meringue, and we could sprinkle a little sugar on it to mask the sourness. I could barely swallow it without retching.

Dinner was a variation on lunch, but whereas after lunch the adults retired to snooze in the hot afternoon, after dinner, we all trooped into the salon. Coffee was served in exquisite little coffee cups, and the children had to sit and make polite conversation until we younger ones were sent to bed.

I had a particular friend, one of the cousins, the same age as me. She spelt her surname for me and wrote it down with pride, telling me she had a very proud surname. She was right and it was only years later that I recognised it as one of the great names in French history. Josephine and I had very little of each other’s language but we made it work for us.

She took me with her maid to pick champignons one misty morning, and as the sun rose, the mist rolled away, and revealed a field of tiny, blue flowers shimmering with hosts of tiny, iridescent blue butterflies the same blue as the flowers. The dusty, country lanes were festooned with sweet, juicy bunches of blackberries as big as grapes, and everywhere there were shrines and crucifixes.

We played tennis together on the court set a little way back from the chateau. In the afternoon when the adults and toddlers were resting, we were roped in for deadly games of croquet on a long lawn well away from the shuttered windows where dozing parents wouldn’t hear the vicious battles and bullying of the victors, and tears and tantrums of the defeated. The girls were mostly the defeated. I tried desperately to hold back my tears as my ball disappeared regularly into the rhododendrons. They were all such terrible sports I felt it my duty to try to maintain the Anglican tradition of good sportsmanship, but my sang froid crumbled very easily.

Other days, we were lined up for the partridge shooting, and issued with white rags on sticks. We then had to advance in line across the vine yards and fields, driving the birds in front of us in the cruel time- honoured method. I did it without a pang, because I had no idea what we were doing, since the instructions were in rapid French. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I had understood, I was too handicapped by trying to be a good guest to voice any objections.

It was fun of course. We grabbed bunches of purple grapes to stuff into our mouths as we advanced slowly, and then dropped them as we came upon a bigger and better bunch a few yards on. When the shoot was over, we children were transported to the chateau whose land we were shooting over. There were four or five other chateaus within a few miles of our village, several which I could see on the sky-line – romantic and elegant eighteenth century pavilions.

On one day after tumbling around and sliding down the hay in the barns, frightening the hens, we were taken to clean up, and then ushered into the salon for afternoon tea. I was fascinated, for not only was our hostess beautiful, but so was the room. Whereas the salon at Persac was a higgledy-piggledy mixture of French furniture of different styles which had simply accumulated over the centuries in order to seat the family, this was a room with great style and elegance, even to my ignorant eyes.

The colours were clear, pale pastels, with gleaming gilt or pale, painted furniture. The portraits were not heavy oils, and sturdy worthies, like Persac, but delicate, gilt- framed frivolous likenesses, and translucent miniatures. The chairs and sofas and gilt tables were arranged with a wonderful sense of symmetry. There were flowers everywhere and big windows with the light streaming in – I fell in love with the place. I wanted to ask them how come they hadn’t they been obliterated in the French Revolution and the chateau destroyed? How come you got away with it, I longed to ask, but didn’t dare.

These people were cousins, as were all the people in the neighbouring chateaux, but they had quite a different atmosphere to the rather provincial heaviness of Persac. I was sad to go back to the ivied, spidered chateau. But it was necessary. I was secretly feeding the farm dog, who slunk around the farm yard some way away from the Chateau, but within the grounds. It was a real French farm yard, with ducks and geese waddling around, a dung heap and a fetid pond, chickens clucking over their new laid eggs in the hay filled barns, and an assortment of cows, pigs and horses.

Patou, the starving farm dog, seemed the only animal who wasn’t looked after, presumably because he wasn’t intended for eating. The maids in the kitchen let me have a few stale crusts, and I lobbied them every day for more for the poor creature. Patou -which the mads said meant ugly – was the first of many animals who have ruined my holidays.

One afternoon I was herded with the other children into the narrow  grey cobbled streets of the village at the gates of the chateau. The whole village seemed to be standing there, including old ladies dressed entirely in black, and others who leaned out of shuttered windows overlooking us. As I stood there feeling bewildered, a column of bikes suddenly  hurtled past us to the cheers and waves of all the spectators. That, I was proudly informed, when they had passed, was the Tour de France. No outriders, no loudhailers, no crowd control, no yellow jerseys – just tanned -looking men on bikes pedalling hell – for- leather.

Shortly after, I caught an early plane back to London, driving through grey, early morning streets of Paris craning to see elegant ladies of fashion. ” There weren’t any,” I told my parents disgustedly. My stepmother pointed out that they hadn’t even woken at that hour in the morning, and all I had seen was people going to work. This was my tour de France.

 

Food for threadbare gourmets

 I love cake, but if I’m making one myself it has to be easy. So this recipe which I found years ago was perfect. It’s called Hurry-up coffee cake and uses left-over percolator coffee. I particularly love coffee and walnut cake with lashings of coffee icing…

In a large bowl put one and a half cups of self -raising flour, two table spoons of cornflour, a good cup of brown sugar, 125 grammes of softened butter, half a cup of strong black coffee, two eggs beaten, a few drops of vanilla, and three quarters of a cup of chopped walnuts. Beat all this together until smooth, spoon into a greased cake tin and bake in a moderate oven (180C or 350F) for thirty minutes. When cool, cut in half and spread with coffee icing – a cup of icing sugar, two tablespoons of softened butter and one tablespoon of strong black coffee.

Food for thought

“And remember, as it was written, to love another person is to see the face of God.”  Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

 

 

 

 


 

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June 13, 2015 · 8:09 pm

The wilder shores of love

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I’m a sucker for romance, passion, adventure – is there a woman who isn’t? Not the bodice ripper stories of the supermarkets racks but the real thing… the: ’Love is an ever-fixed mark ‘ stuff of life.

I admit I revelled in The Prisoner of Zenda as a teenager, the ‘I did not love thee dear so much, loved I not honour more’, and the red rose delivered once a year to the ravishing queen from her honourable and faithful cavalier, a very English gentleman. And it took me a while to recognise Ashley Wilke’s gutless having his cake and eating it with Melanie and Scarlet, I was so dazzled by his weary elegance and assumption of honour.

But it’s the real thing that hooks me now… the courage to dare and love and think the world well lost in order to follow the heart. So how could I resist Jane Digby? Not her famous descendant, Pamela Digby.

She married the famously un-likeable Randolph Churchill, becoming Winston Churchill’s daughter- in- law, lover of Averill Harriman during the war, mistress of every millionaire, playboy and sex symbol in the post war years… Prince Aly Khan, Marquis de Portago, Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli, Baron Elie de Rothschild, and Stavros Niarchos amongst others. Ed Murrow intended to give up his wife for her, and returned home to fix it, and reneged. She became the fifth wife of impresario Leland Hayward, and finally, when he was eighty-one, snaffled Averill Harriman again, this time in marriage, and became powerful and respectable as US Ambassador to France. No, Pamela Digby’s quest feels like something other than love.

But her beautiful ancestor Jane Digby was something else. Jane was married very young to a man twice her age, who dallied with a servant girl on their honeymoon, and not surprisingly the marriage never took off. Left to her own devices while Lord Ellenborough devoted himself to his political career, she not surprisingly fell in love with a gorgeous playboy, Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, who was besotted with her. Jane, young and naive, never thought of hiding her love, and of course they came to grief.

The Prince was withdrawn from London in the interests of his glittering diplomatic career, Ellenborough divorced Jane – a horrendous and tortuous decision which entailed Jane’s actions being dragged through the House of Lords and the House of Commons and her becoming a pariah – and she followed her lover to Paris where she gave birth to a daughter. Schwarzenberg kept her on a string for some years, and Jane was too blinded by love to see it.

Finally she left and went to Munich, where the King Ludwig, a clever intelligent man became a close and loving friend, and an upright but ultimately boring German aristocrat wooed her for some years before she gave in… and then she fell in love with a handsome Greek count. Her husband Baron Karl von Vennigen fought a duel with Count Spiridion Theotsky… and Jane ended by running off with her glamorous Greek. They enjoyed a lotus- eating life in places like Corfu, before ending up at the court in Athens. Von Vennigen never stopped loving the fascinating Jane and wrote to her until he died.

In Athens her Greek husband became unfaithful so Jane took up with a sixty- year old white mustachioed Pallikari bandit chieftan , Cristos Hadji-Petros.
She entered  into mountain life wholeheartedly, dressing like the peasant women of the tribe, and learning to cook, make feta cheese, sleep in the open air on goats-hair blankets, galloping on horseback around the mountains, drinking retsina and making mad, passionate love with the wicked old bandit.

It all fell to pieces when Jane’s maid told her she having trouble fending off the calculating rough brigand who smelt of garlic and too few baths. Jane and her maid disappeared from Athens, Jane now sad and depressed and nearly fifty… and she decided to explore all the ancient cities and historical sites now under the sway of the latest bandits, Isis.

She negotiated a bodyguard to escort her to the glorious ruins of Palmyra. Even back in 1853, tourists were drawn to the dangerous journey to this fabled city, and the Bedouin tribes competed against each other to guard travellers from other tribes who threatened to rob the Europeans. Sheik Medjuel el Mesrab was the Bedouin chief who commanded Jane’s bodyguard, and by the time they had reached Palmyra, he had proposed to Jane and offered to give up his wife.

She didn’t succumb straightaway, and later had to fend off an offer from another determined Arab sheik. Feeling depressed and lonely she continued travelling before returning to Damascus. But Medjuel had kept tracks on her, and as she approached Damascus he rode out to meet her, with an Arab mare as a gift of welcome, and his wife already sent back to her people with her dowry.

They fell deeply in love and married. Jane spent the last twenty five years of her life living partly in Damascus and partly in the desert whenever her husband had to take his flocks and people to different areas of grazing, or to fight other tribes. Jane rode with him into battle. She was a brilliant horsewoman and broke in many of Medjuel’s Arab thoroughbreds, she spoke nine languages, was a witty conversationalist and a talented artist. Her exquisite manners, gentleness, beauty and charm won over both the reluctant tribe and the disapproving local community.

Jane threw herself into the life of the Bedouins when they camped in the desert, and dyed her long fair hair and eyebrows black as the Arabs felt that fair hair attracted the Evil Eye. She plaited her hair in two long braids which reached to her feet and wore the clothes of the Bedouin women, learning to milk camels, prepare her husband’s food, and stand and wait on him, and wash his hands and hair, face and feet. Medjuel on the other hand, impressed everyone who met him with his refinement, intelligence, and elegance.

In her home in Damascus she had a huge menagerie of creatures and created one of the most famous gardens in a city famous for its gardens. She and Medjuel had a passionate and tempestuous relationship which never lost its intensity in over twenty five years. Nearing seventy four, she wrote in her diary: “it is now a month and twenty days since Medjuel last slept with me. What can be the reason?“ Though younger than Jane, Medjuel was feeling his age by now, and this year stayed close to his wife instead of joining his tribe. Not long after writing these words, she faded away after an attack of dysentery, Medjuel by her side.

The Sheik was persuaded to ride in a closed black carriage to her funeral, until suddenly overcome by grief and needing open space he bolted from the carriage and fled in the opposite direction to the cortege. Everyone was shocked by this breach of funeral etiquette. But as the clergyman was intoning: ‘ashes to ashes’, Medjuel galloped up on his wife’s favourite black Arabian mare. He sat motionless staring down into the grave and no-one moved or spoke. Moments passed as he sat there in anguish and then the Bedouin Chief rode away.

Jane would have loved her husband’s farewell. He returned to the grave once more. He brought a rough slab of Mazoni rock, carved to fit over the base of Jane’s tomb. He carved her name: Madame Digby el Mezrab on it in Arabic and disappeared into the desert.

A missionary who knew her well described her life as: ‘wild, passionate and reckless’, while her devoted friend, the explorer Sir Richard Burton said that her ‘life’s poetry never sank to prose’. Her life is an inspiration to a romantic. By following her heart she finally found the one person in the world, in Truman Capote’s touching words in The Grass Harp:’ … from whom nothing is held back…’ and: ‘to whom everything can be said’.

And those words, it seems to me, are the definition of true love. They mean perfect trust. No co-dependency, neediness or misunderstandings through lack of communication. But trust takes courage, and maybe to paraphrase the words of that haunting song ‘The Rose’, true love is only for the brave … like Jane Digby el Mesrab.

 

Food for threadbare gourmets

Sometimes I just want a plate of roast vegetables, but also feel I must need some protein. I kid myself that this pea-nut sauce will fill the gap. It’s quite unlike the traditional pea-nut sauce, and was dreamed up in front of me by a chef at a demonstration.
In a stick blender, I spoon a cup or more of pea-nut butter, the skin thinly peeled from a lemon, plus the juice, a good teaspoon or more to taste of dried thyme, a couple of garlic cloves, a tea-spoon of fish sauce, a dessert-spoon or more to taste of brown sugar, plenty of salt and black pepper, and a cup or more of olive oil. Just whizz everything together. And add more olive oil if you need it. It lasts for plenty of time in the fridge, and is good with baked or sauted vegetables for a light meal, and also with baked salmon.

 

Food for Thought

He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That puts it not unto the touch
To win or lose it all…
From ‘My dear and only love’, John Graham, Marquis of Montrose

 

Lesley Blanch who died this year at 103 wrote The Wilder Shores of Love

 

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October 8, 2013 · 10:37 pm

Robinson Crusoe has a message for us

My grandmother collected beautiful china and old books. My memories of the china was that it actually wasn’t beautiful… At eight I found her collection of Staffordshire figurines rather clumsy, and her Meissen angels and other pieces a bit gutless and wishy-washy. (I think I still do – but give me Chinese blue and white, Japanese Imari, old Chelsea, and I’d feel differently.)

Her old books were heavily bound in leather, and were often large quarto volumes. I skimmed Foxe’s Martyrs, was appalled by the despair in the picture of the Slough of Despond in Pilgrim’s Progress, but was very taken with Robinson Crusoe. All these books were illustrated with engravings, protected by a flimsy piece of what seemed like tissue paper.

 I hadn’t learned to take liberties with books back then, so I solemnly plodded through Defoe’s dense prose, until I came to the picture of Crusoe seeing other foot-prints on the island – Man Friday’s. I was as shocked and horrified as Crusoe at the implications of this find.

 The real Robinson Crusoe was Alexander Selkirk, a sailing master, who in 1704 had fallen out with his peppery captain over repairing the ship. The captain refused, and in the resulting row Selkirk said the ship could go to the bottom without him. The captain seized on these words as a pretext to put the troublesome Selkirk ashore on the nearest island, Mas a Tierra being close at hand.

 Marooning was the worst punishment of pirates, and offenders were put ashore with their sea chest, a pistol and one ball. Selkirk, no pirate, regretted his hastiness but it was too late, the captain was implacable. He was lucky in that his seaman’s chest held a Bible, a couple of other books, and various knives and practical items, including some mathematical instruments.

 He built two huts from pimento logs, and lined them with goat-skin for insulation. One was his smokehouse and kitchen, the other, some distance away, was his study and sleeping quarters. He burnt pimento logs for cooking and heating in the winter, and found the wood was almost smokeless, and ‘refreshed him with its fragrant smell’

 For the first few days he was sunk in depression, but in the long term, he constructed an interesting existence. There were plenty of vegetables planted by seamen who had called to replenish their water, goats had been left there to breed as a source of food for other seamen, while rats had swum ashore and bred so prolifically that cats had been released to control them.

 Selkirk quickly ran out of ammunition, so was reduced to killing goats for food with his knife. With no alcohol, no tobacco, no salt-preserved meats, no sugar, dairy, grains or chemicals, no tea or coffee, and with plenty of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and fish, unpolluted air and water, Selkirk’s health improved so remarkably that he was able to outrun the fleetest goats, and often did so, notching their ears as a record of achievement or sign of ownership, if he needed no meat at the time.

 The rats, which had swum ashore from boats  anchored in the shallows while the sailors replenished their water were a pest, nibbling Selkirk’s feet at night, and invading his stores, so he caught kittens and tamed them, and, in time, dozens of cats shared his hut, protecting him and giving him company.

 After a bad fall, he realised that his survival depended on being healthy, so he caught goat kids, lamed them and tamed them too, so that he had a ready source of food. He even taught the cats and some of the kids to dance for a hobby. When his clothes fell to pieces he made replacements out of goat-skins.

 There never was a Man Friday – just two Spanish ships which called for fresh water, and getting a glimpse of Selkirk, fired on him and chased him. He escaped them, preferring to stay on the island to being killed or imprisoned and set to work in a mine. When Selkirk was discovered after five years and rescued by a British ship, he found the salt – meat revolting at first, but when he became used to it again, and resumed the habits of the sailors, within a few weeks on board he had lost his incredible fitness and good health.

The natives of the Marquesas Islands told missionaries – and whalers also reported – that they didn’t enjoy the taste of white men, they were too salty and very tough. White men could only be made palatable by boiling, rather than the usual baking in earth ovens! Presumably the seamen who constituted this diet were both skinny and underfed, but gristly with muscle from shinning up masts and pulling on ropes, and had salted themselves with all the salt beef and pork they had no choice but to eat.

 So when Selkirk detoxified his body on fish and organically grown meat and vegetables, and lived under these conditions for five years, not just for three weeks at a health farm, he showed how healthy our bodies could be in ideal conditions, compared with the self-inflicted illnesses caused by processed food.

 Now three hundred years later, it’s hard to know what to eat that is actually pure, fish is as much a victim to the pollution of our oceans as vegetables grown with chemicals in modern farming agri-businesses, meat reared on hormones and anti-biotics, or processed dairy products.

 I suppose the one thing we can do is to cut out sugar, but for most of us, it’s a comfort food, and who doesn’t need comfort?  At least sugar doesn’t make us drunk and disorderly. So bring on a nice piece of shortbread with our cup of tea, or the chocolate box, or even a simple coffee and walnut meringue gateau with a glass of delicious dessert wine, and let us laugh and be merry and enjoy the sweetness of life! 

 

 Food for Threadbare Gourmets

From the sublime to the ridiculous. In this case, from the bliss of coffee and walnut meringue gateau to the mundaneity of sausage and mash – one of my husband’s favourites. I found a wonderful gravy cum sauce to spice it up for him. Chop two large onions, and fry gently in butter and oil until golden brown. Add two tablsp of brown sugar and keep frying until it’s a deep satisfying brown. Stir in a tablsp of balsamic vinegar, and enough gravy browning or Oxo powder plus stock to thicken to your taste. Salt and pepper. Let it bubble up and serve with good sausages, or as we sometimes do, with a savoury vegetarian loaf of almonds and lentils. (recipe to come)

 

Food for Thought

 

I am most entertained by those actions which give me a light into the nature of man.

 Daniel Defoe 1660 -1731 was a far more interesting man than his hero. He is considered one of the fathers of the novel, writing nine, including Moll Flanders. He was merchant, journalist, trader and spy, he wrote over 500 books and pamphlets and political treatises and created several newspapers and magazine which came out several times a week and which were written by him.

 PS Still having production problems, but console myself with the optimistic thought that everything passes, even computer nightmares, and that the blog will be up and running again soon..

 

 

 

 

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