More postcards

With a rush of blood to the head just before Christmas I signed up for the postcard exchange being organised by Amy Souza. She runs the Spark project which pairs writers and artists and gives each party a chance to be inspired by the other's work.

Her plan for January 2015 is to put together groups of six people to create and send each other postcards during the month. Briliant idea...

But wait – that means I have to make the cards – collage was mentioned in the introductory email and other art-related stuff. To misquote the lyrics of The Specials Rat Race

I don't have one Art O level.

In fact I was hopeless at art at school. Whatever came over me! Writing the poems to go on the back of the card will be fine but what about the Artwork....

I scared myself even more by looking for DIY art postcards and similar on the internet. There is some serious art with a capital A out there.

But I have been thinking very hard and may have some ideas.

My five companions in this adventure are from the USA and are scattered all over the states. I've been learning more about US geography, courtesy of google maps. If you start in New York, go via the New Jersey Turnpike to Arlington VA, then Poplarville MS, then Minneapolis and finally Beaverton, OR (OR = Oregon I think) you will have covered 4,150 miles taking 60 hours or about 60 days on foot but more importantly you will have visited the towns and cities of my fellow postcard creators.

Now I have not one but two ideas for cardsand the post office in Wing sells blank postcards in paxks of 25 so I have scope for some experiments. 

Leaving the line - postcards

As the year draws to a close I wanted to mention some of the lovely things that have come my way in this mostly unlovely year for me personally.

One of my favourites of the autumn was Leaving the line – Images and words of War and Wondering. This is a Bristol based project created by Tania Hershman, writer, flash fiction creator, poet and Jeremy Banning, military historian and battlefield guide extraordinaire. Their idea was to create a series of twelve postcards inspired by images and stories from the First World War.

They were gathering material while we were out in France and Belgium in October on the fourth writers trip organised by Vanessa Gebbie – Tania had that bright eyed, cocked head look of a Robin that has just spotted something worth investigating and turning over. So I was interested to see what the postcards would be like.

When the set of cards dropped through my letterbox in November my reaction was Wow. 

There have been many commemorative projects during 2014 but this one was special. 

The words on the cards are written by Jeremy (four cards) and Tania (eight cards) and there is more information on the back of each card about the context. They are an example of what poetry does best; some poems will make you want to cry, Kaddish, others will teach you something The things they carried, and they will all - Unmemorial, If he was here now he’d say - make you think about what commemorating the war can mean. 

You can see all of the cards here and listen to Tania and Jeremy talking about their collaboration and about stepping into each other’s worlds. 

The seamen at Tower Hill

The merchant navy memorial at Tower Hill is  a melancholy place to go to. My visits always seem to coincide with dusk…

‘And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds’ as Owen put it and the light was dying last Friday as a friend and I walked around the memorial garden. The plaques are arranged in order by ship and there are men who I make a habit of visiting to pay my respects. The first, young Peter Chamberlain was little more than a boy, aged nineteen and on his first voyage on the SS Cornwall. He was in the radio room and was killed on 31^st August 1940 when the ship was straddled by bombs. 

Thanks to the seamanship of her master, Francis Pretty the Cornwall did make it to Malta.

Francis Pretty then became captain of the Nottingham whilst the badly damaged Cornwall was awaiting repairs. The Nottingham was lost with all hands in the Atlantic on 7^th November 1941. So Pretty’s name is on the walls too not far from Chamberlain’s. 

Last Friday we also paid our respects to some the ships lost during Operation Pedestal in August 1942. There is the MV Glenorchy whose crew did manage to take to the lifeboats, apart from those who had already been killed. Glenorchy’s captain G Leslie refused to leave his ship and went down with her.

Then there was the Waimarama which like all the other ships in the convoy was carrying aviation fuel which exploded when she was hit.

“The biggest explosion I have ever seen. The flames were hundreds of feet high and agreat expanse of sea was covered in roiling smoke and flames” Roger Hill, H.M. S. Ledbury

There would be more names on the plaque under Waimarama had Roger Hill and his crew not braved the inferno to rescue as many as they could. But among the names of the dead is that of Bowdory, a man in his sixties who had joined up because his sons were serving in the armed forces and he wanted to play his part. He’d befriended the young Fred Treves but there was nothing Treves could do to save Bowdory who could not swim when the raft he was on was dragged back in the flames. You can find an interview with Treves as a much older man on youtube recounting what happened and weeping.

The Lusitana is there too. She went down with 1,153 passengers and crew off Kinsale on 7^th May 1915.

So the Tower Hill memorial is a place of great sadness but as important as many of the other better known memorials, like the Cenotaph. These seamen have no graves except for this sea and this at least is somewhere to remember them.

I often wish that the powers that be could spare the funds to set up a visitor’s centre or similar, to provide those who pass by with more information about these ships and these men.