Through a glass darkly

Back to Istanbul

The summer of ’64 is a long time ago. As long as from the outbreak of the First World War to the Beatles’ first LP ! But now that we are about to go to Istanbul, on a short, three-day visit from Ankara, it seems a good time to recall what I can of my first visit to that captivating city.

For the first half of 1964, after leaving school in December ‘63, I was working at County Hall, the headquarters of the then London County Council. It was a daily commute on the District Line from Southfields, where my parents lived, to Westminster, just across the river Thames. It wasn’t a glamorous job. I worked in EO/GP1, which was mainly concerned with administering the Common Entrance [11 Plus] exam. Outside my County Hall job I was a more-or-less regular member of the Putney Young Socialists, who were campaigning to overthrow the sitting Conservative MP and to elect Hugh Jenkins [not Roy Jenkins] in his place; I listened to my small collection of LPs on my father’s record player; and I went to the cinema a lot with Tina, whom I had met just before Christmas. She was a film enthusiast. And I occasionally looked at my reading list for Oxford, which beckoned the following autumn. But not very seriously, and not for very long !

Some of my CH friends had already set off overseas. John Gregory was working in a bookshop somewhere in the west of France, possibly in Angers. Clive and Howard were first somewhere in Sweden, reportedly lumber-jacking, but then later in Malta. [They were friends; not a gay couple. Both sadly now dead.] Walter was tutoring a distinctly upper-class Italian child in Italy, possibly in Genoa. Ian who had called on Walter in Genoa, most probably in search of a good meal, was now apparently in Rome, finding his way around by asking Catholic priests for directions in Latin. It seemed that the only people left in London were Chang Young and John Mitchell, whom I bumped into at Battersea Fun Fair, where they were working on the ghost train. And me.

Constantinople was the target. It looked a long way, but it was as far as you could travel without needing to take a boat. I had a map in the back of my pocket diary which showed where it was.  If there were any student trains or flights, I wasn’t aware of them. So the answer was hitch-hiking. I had hitched a few times before: down the A4 from my grandparents’ house to London; around Sussex on school half-holidays; and, memorably, to the Mediterranean and back with my brother, Paul, a couple of years before. But this was a more challenging, more ambitious trip. I said good-bye to Mary, whom I’d met at the Putney YS, and bought a Michelin map of Europe, a canvas grip bag, and a single ticket from London Victoria to Calais.

Maybe the journey is always more memorable than the destination ? My first night was in the youth hostel at Dunkerque, where I splashed out on a tomato omelette in a cafe. The next afternoon I met a man by the roadside in Belgium who told me he had seen the German army come across “that field there” twice in his life-time. I spent that night, uncomfortably, in Köln railway station. The next day I was offered a lift to Marienbad in a Ford V-8 Pilot by a Czech who was returning home from London. Briefly I had visions of conversations at Oxford, “Last year in Marienbad …” . But when the Pole ran out of petrol and started to refill the tank from a jerry-can with a lighted cigarette in his mouth, I thought better of it. Fortuitously, there on the hard shoulder, I trod on the toes of a rather nervous Indian, who asked the way to Bombay. I showed him carefully on my map. But he couldn’t read. And so I spent a day travelling with him and his wife and son, and a large cooking pot, down German autobahns. It did cross my mind to stay with them for the whole journey. But I got nervous about the eating arrangements and got out in Munich.

After that it is all fragments. I spent an evening in Munich with a Jewish girl from Canada, all of whose family had died in concentration camps. In Vienna I got drunk in a subterranean wine bar along with an American girl. We extricated ourselves with some difficulty. And rode home to the hostel on her scooter. In Klagenfurt I ventured into a restaurant by myself, and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, which turned out to be egg mayonnaise. I may have been the only customer. And the staff watched as I ate it very slowly.

From there the road turned south over the Loibl Pass. Had I not then acquired my rampant acrophobia ? Which makes all mountain roads a trial. A Yugoslav family took me from the top of the Pass all the way to Belgrade. We arrived very late at night. They let me sleep in the car and brought me sugar on brown bread and plum brandy for breakfast. A German car picked me up going south from Belgrade. I exhausted my very limited German speaking to the driver until we realised that we were both English. It was my first ever two-day lift. We spent the night in a hotel in Sofia. Back in London the wife of the Bulgarian press attaché had told me, as we walked in Kensington Gardens, that Sofia was a magical town, a sort of cross between Heidelburg and Schwerin. My recollection is that it looked more like a cross between Slough and Livingstone, West Lothian.

As we approached Constantinople things became more foreign. Fewer cars on the road. The Dragoman pass between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria was not tarmac but loose stones. The village markets contained nothing but water melons. Between the villages we passed people in ox carts. The frontier guard at the Bulgarian border carefully inspected my visa upside-down. And he wanted to hold onto my passport. From Edirne [Adrianople] mosques and minarets replaced churches.

My driver took me out to dinner when we arrived, in a restaurant that gave onto the Bosphorus. I have a dim memory of eating stuffed vine-leaves and drinking ouzo. It was too late to find the youth hostel. He rang the bell of a cheap hotel, and the owner ushered me in darkness into a room. When I woke upon the morning I was sharing it with half a dozen Turks and a hundred flies, all competing for space on a naked light bulb.

I think I probably did the usual things in Constantinople, as I continued to call it in my head. I certainly made my way to the Hagia [Sancta] Sophia and to the Blue Mosque and to the Topkapi Palace. And I wandered, a bit lost, in the Grand Bazaar. Without buying anything. Did I spent time with other people ? Perhaps I did, as I re-met people later in the trip when I got to Venice. My long distance driver took me out to dinner again, in the same restaurant. But rich food gave me the runs, always difficult when you are travelling. An educated Turk who claimed to know Arnold Toynbee [I still had some pretensions then as a future historian] took me on a boat trip up the Golden Horn. Did he squeeze my arm over-much ? I think perhaps he did. But most of the time I was on my own. Living in a youth hostel somewhere in the old town, and drinking lots of tea in a local cafe. One day I took a metro train to what had been recommended to me as a local beach. Going barefoot during my time there was, with hindsight, not a very good idea. 

My recollection is that for everyone else in the hostel Constantinople was just a resting place on the way to somewhere else. A young German with whom I spent some time told me about his adventures hitching to and back from Pakistan. Some Australians suggested that I press on through Turkey and Syria to Jerusalem, and then come back round the Mediterranean via North Africa. But I think that I knew I had gone far enough. Had reached my limit. After maybe a week, and after sending the necessary postcards, I packed my bag and headed back towards Italy. I think I thought that I might catch up with Tina in Perugia, where she had been learning Italian.

It’s not much when I write it down. But it was an epic journey for me at the time. Next week, when we return to Istanbul, as I have now learned to call it, it is only four hours down the high-speed line from Ankara, where I am writing this. It will have changed quite a bit. But then so have I …

April 2023

We are halfway through our time here in Ankara. I continue to be amazed by the steepness of the streets and the amazing proliferation of high-rise buildings. To be horrified by the aggression of  many Ankara drivers, who regard traffic lights as merely advisory. And to be delighted by the helpfulness and friendliness of the Turkish people we speak to – in spite of our language difficulties. 

A day out in Konya

According to Acts 14, Paul and Barnabas visited Iconium on the first missionary journey. They spoke in the synagogue there quite powerfully, but were run out of town by Jewish agitators and fled to Lystra and to Derbe. I went to Iconium, now known as Konya, for the day on Monday. There is little trace of Paul and Barnabas, nor is there any visible Christian presence now.

Konya is the sixth biggest city in Turkey. The high-speed line from Ankara makes the journey of 300 kilometres in just under two hours. It is a comfortable, modern train and the single fare [for someone as old as me] is 56 Tl. Which converts to about £2.50. For the return journey the train was almost full, and I paid four times as much for a ‘superior, executive’ seat, the equivalent of a boxed pew in church. Four of us sat behind a frosted glass sliding door, and were served a glass of tea and an acceptable boxed meal by a uniformed attendant. 

 Once you get clear of Ankara, the train speeds across the brown, treeless Anatolian plateau. There is very little grass. No cows. A single flock  of sheep. There are mountains in the distance, but little water and no rivers.. And an anonymous town with a sprinkling of high-rise, concrete blocks. I stared out of the window, dozed a little, and read Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920. Rogan is an American historian, whose great-uncle John McDonald, from near Perth, was killed at Gallipoli in 1915.

Konya has the reputation of being a conservative, Islamic city. It is a place of pilgrimage for the Muslim world, a city that is dear to the hearts of pious Turks. [And not just Muslims and Turks. I am told that Prince Charles on a visit to Ankara was particularly anxious to visit Konya.] For this city was the adopted home of Celaleddin Rumi, the 13th century Islamic prophet,  poet, and mystic. Rumi is also known as the Mevlana [the Master], and as the founder of the Mevlevi sect, better known as the Whirling Dervishes.

Susie and I were here just after Christmas three years ago, and were predisposed to be a bit unsympathetic  because of the closeness of the word dervish to the word devilish. But Rumi’s writings major on the need for humanity to seek God’s love; and encourage us all to use music, poetry, and dance as ways of reaching out to God. “Love is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries”. And the whirling of the dervishes became a ritual form of communal prayer.

I walked from the station past election posters and a large Atatürk banner to what is now called the Mevlana Museum. It is a complex of dignified stone buildings set in a small park close to the centre of town. The original building dates from the 13th century but has been much added to. The main gate leads into a marble-paved courtyard. This courtyard contains seventeen cells for dervishes and an elaborate ablutions fountain. The mausoleum itself contains Rumi’s sarcophagus, covered with a very fine gold-embroidered brocade all set under a fluted turquoise spire. There is an adjacent Ritual Hall, where the community performed their whirling dance, and a small mosque.

Extracts from Rumi’s writings speak of an ascetic, prayerful rule of life. Not unlike, say, an early Cistercian community. The whole complex was filled with visitors, many of the women in Islamic dress, all behaving in a restrained manner. We all donned plastic overshoes to enter the mausoleum. I was glad to be back in Konya. Rumi’s writings and the teaching of the Mevlevi Order offer an attractive alternative to, say, the Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia or the horrors perpetrated by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Things to ponder over a glass of tea and a baklava on my way back to the station. 

Next week – a brief trip to Istanbul …

April 2023

Anitkabir

On Tuesday we went with Elizabeth and with Juanita to Anitkabir, undoubtedly the major tourist attraction in Ankara. Elizabeth is the doyenne of the congregation at St Nicolas, married to a Turkish geologist, and has lived in Ankara since the 1970s. Juanita is a Ghanaian, who trained as a doctor in Kiev, in the Ukraine. but teaches here in a primary school. Anitkabir is the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. Everything is on a gigantic scale.

When Atatürk died in 1938, in Istanbul, his body was brought here and placed in the main hall of the Ethnography Museum. In 1941 a competition was organised to design a fitting memorial, or mausoleum. The Mausoleum sits in a Peace Park of some 750,000 square metres, containing almost 50,000 trees donated by some 25 different countries. Approach to the Mausoleum is via the Road of Lions, a 250 metre pedestrian path flanked by 12 sculpted lions in Hittite style. This path leads into the Ceremonial Square, built to hold some 15,000 people. The Museum comprises some of Atatürk’s belongings – ceremonial daggers and swords, expensive pens, military uniforms, pyjamas and dressing gown [everything except his truss and his tooth-brush]; lively paintings and representations of the major battles of the War of Independence; and an exhibition of some of the major achievements of his presidency. We paused at this point for coffee in what may be the world’s most chaotically organised museum cafe. Presided over by two charmless young women.

The culmination of the tour is the Hall of Honour. You mount 42 steps from the Ceremonial Square to enter a rectangular building. with an elaborate 17 metres high ceiling. The hall is empty except for a massive 40 tonne red marble sarcophagus. And crowds of Turkish families taking photographs on their phones. The intention is that every Turk should visit the Mausoleum, at least once. Atatürk was undoubtedly as great man, who made possible the emergence of modern Turkey.  But it all smacks of emperor [ancestor] worship. The whole complex looks like an Osbert Lancaster cartoon [from his Pillar to Post] to illustrate ‘Monumental Totalitarian Architecture’. 

Election time

There are big posters on the streets for next month’s elections. Both municipal and presidential. For President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the coming election is of major importance. This year, 2023, is the centenary of the creation of the secular Republic of Turkey under the direction of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. If Erdogan wins, he will be empowered to put even more of his stamp on the government; to break with Atatürk’s heritage and to press for an increasingly conservative religious model. It is not clear to me whether Erdogan is a genuinely religious man. Or just a politician who wants to play the Muslim card to his advantage.The results of the election will have a significant impact on Turkey’s role within NATO; on Turkey’s future relationship with the States, the EU, and Russia; and on Ankara’s policy towards the war in Ukraine. 

There are four presidential candidates. The main challenger to Erdogan is Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, nicknamed the’Turkish Gandhi’, who is promising big changes. The opposition is confident it can unfreeze European Union accession talks — at a standstill since 2018 over the country’s democratic backsliding — by introducing liberal reforms;  in terms of the rule of law, greater freedom for the media, and depoliticisation of the judiciary. In the event of a close result, it is not clear whether Erdogan would willingly stand aside. We shall see soon enough.

On the streets

It seems to me that there are fewer police on the streets than three years ago. And that they have swopped blue blouson jackets for all-black outfits. By contrast the vast number of taxis are an almost luminous orange. The taxis have vigorous competition from what seems to be an efficient bus service and a network of dolmuss, communal mini-buses. Few people talk on the bus, though some whisper into their phones. Young people are quick to offer a seat to Susie and to me. For which we are grateful. The driving is mainly aggressive with much use of the horn. It is quite common to see a car with its bonnet up at the side of the road with four or five men peering at the engine. And perhaps an older man as back-up on his mobile phone.

The pattern of commerce, of shops, is puzzling. On Rabindranath Tagore Caddesi., the nearest shopping street, there are innumerable cafes and restaurants, most of which are generally empty. And there are numerous ‘[super]markets’, with a limited stock of cold drinks and some basic groceries. There are several pharmacies and two flower shops. And a sprinkling of shops that sell electrical appliances and mobile phone covers and mobile phone chargers and similar accessories. But there is nothing that looks like a traditional baker’s or butcher’s shop.  

Yesterday was the end of Ramadan, a holy day for Muslims. There were crowds of people in town; families with children, gangs of young boys, gaggles of young girls. In the sunshine it felt like August Bank Holiday. And there was free travel on the buses. Tomorrow we shall be back in church for the third Sunday of Easter. The gospel reading is the encounter on the Emmaus Road. Which for me is one of the most evocative of all Bible stories.

April 2023

Dave very kindly gave us lift to the airport in Edinburgh, and it was mid-afternoon when we took off. But it was 22.30h local time when we landed in Istanbul. The flight with Turkish Airlines was excellent: comfortable seats, good food, and we arrived ten minutes early. The new Istanbul airport is about the size of East Lothian. The onward flight is little more than an hour. We are back in Ankara, doing locum work with the congregation of St Nicolas in Myra.

We arrived at Ankara airport at 3.25am, a pretty uncivilised time. The driver who was to meet us at the airport [or so I understood] did not materialise. Thankfully we were bailed out by a very helpful taxi driver, who took us to the front gate of the British Embassy to collect the keys, and then brought us on here to the apartment. And was very happy to be paid in £ sterling. For which I was very grateful. [The alternative would have been euros.]. We are in a very comfortable apartment in Çankaya, with a technical college and a mosque across the road.

Ankara

Ankara is an enormous city of some 5 to 6 million people, all built since 1926. When Atatürk chose to make this remote, primitive railway junction, high up on the Anatolian plateau, the capital of the new secular Republic of Turkey. In place of historic Constantinople which was too closely associated with the [bad old days of] the Ottoman Empire. Our apartment is high up on the south side of the city, and looks out across rolling hills of modern, pale-coloured apartment blocks. There is a huge amount of building going on.

Where the ground is too steep to build on, vacant plots of grass and stones are inhabited by packs of big, but friendly,  wild dogs. They are handsome Anatolian sheepdogs. And they are not available for export.

Saint Nicolas of Myra

Saint Nicolas of Myra is an attractive, stone-built, modern, single storey chapel. It is in the grounds of the British Embassy, which means that access is through a double security gate where a guard checks your passport against the list. Those who wish to attend church have to  register, with their passports, by the previous Thursday. Which rather militates against casual church going ! The church is about half an hour’s walk from the apartment, mainly downhill, down the busy Rabindranath Tagore Caddesi. Which is full of eateries and small supermarkets.

There has been an Anglican presence in Turkey for centuries. But the Ankara chapel dates from about sixty years ago. It was built within the Embassy compound with most of the money donated by Americans. We had lunch with Ron, one of the founding fathers, yesterday. The congregation has gone up and down over the years. Susie and I were last here for Advent and Christmas 2019. When the church was recovering from a schism caused, in part,  by the influx of a large number of Iranian refugees. But there were tensions among the Iranian diaspora, and eventually all Iranians were banned from the compound. Which dramatically reduced the size of the congregation.

Yesterday morning there were 18 of us, variously from the UK, from South Africa, the United States, the Netherlands, Ghana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The service was Common Worship Holy Communion. Singing is from Anglican Hymns Old and New. The organist is Zeynip Balkanli, Turkish, a Muslim, and delightful. She has been playing at church for about 15 years. The diversity of the Diocese in Europe is always a delight.

Everyday life

Some nights we are wakened in the dark by the call of the muezzin. But not this morning. Instead the day began with a power cut, happily not too long. And some communication issues centred on the church mobile phone, an Android. I know my limitations and don’t go near it. But Susie is wrestling with it to communicate with the local congregation What’s App group. 

This afternoon we took the bus down into town, about 25 minutes, all downhill, in order to buy an Ankara travel pass. The flat rate for all bus journeys is 9.5Tl, a bit less than 50p. The alternative is to take a dolmuss, a communal mini-bus. For which the standard rate is 10 Tl. On the way home we were caught in a sudden and violent thunderstorm, with hail and heavy rain. Not foreseen by the BBC weather forecast. But generally the last few days have been warm and sunny.

While we are here we plan to visit Atatùrk’s enormous mausoleum, And the Roman Baths. And to return to the old quarter around Ulus and the Citadel. And possibly to go down to Istanbul on the train. I was first there as a hitch-hiker some 60 years ago.

April 2023

Passion Week

Ich habe angst was the phrase that caught my attention. Denis Lennon used to say that there may be just one thing in sermons through which God speaks to us. And we should concentrate on that phrase or that verse. [And ignore the rest ?] During Passion Week there is by tradition a Newington Churches Together service each day at Craigmillar Park church at 7.45am.  Just a hymn or two and a reading and a reflection by one of the local ministers. Followed by a simple breakfast in the adjoining church hall. I like to try and get there when I wake up in time. And when it’s not raining. It is a tradition whose days are numbered; as the Church of Scotland is currently reorganising itself into a smaller number of linked charges. And Craigmillar Park is one of the churches that has not made the cut. [My suggestion is that it should be water-proofed, filled with water, and then turned into a Diving Centre. But not everyone agrees. It’s more likely to become a block of flats.]

On Wednesday morning the reading was from Mark 11, where Jesus takes Peter, James, and John along with him to the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is deeply distressed and troubled. He prays to the Father, “… everything is possible with you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” After praying he returns to the disciples and finds them sleeping. He chides them for not being able to stay awake at this critical moment. And then the whole thing happens all over again.

[The Revd Dr] Sandy Forsyth, the minister at Mayfield Salisbury, asked us what we understood when we exchanged the Peace in a Sunday service. Clearly peace is something to which we as Christians aspire. And it is clearly linked to the presence of Jesus. But the Hebrew word shalom means so much more than the absence of fighting. And it is not simply a peace that is guaranteed by the deterrence of two powerful people or two blocs of countries. If Macron’s visit to China encourages the Chinese to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, which at the moment seems very unlikely, it is not at all clear that a meaningful peace would ensue.

Ich habe angst

On the Tuesday night I was dreaming about Joanna. I was trying to get to a church service in which she was involved. Possibly her wedding ? And I was running late. The church for no obvious reason was underground, beneath the surface life of a busy city. I had to find an entrance down to the underground, and then to find the right tunnel in a series of subways. When I eventually arrived, something was not right. Joanna was wearing a long dress, which might have been a wedding dress. But there was no sign of her husband. And no indication of any service about to start. When I woke out of the dream, the overall feeling was one of disconnection, And disappointment.

There are things in this life, Sandy said, of which we are afraid. Things which disturb us. And that is as true for Christians as for anyone else. He told us about a Jesuit church, St Peter’s in Köln, [the church, I think, where Rubens was baptised], where there is an altar with the inscription Ich habe angst. Meaning, I am fearful. Which some people think is not a very Christian message. But it is a reminder that anxiety, apprehension, insecurity are all common aspects of the human condition. Which are best countered by prayer, and by seeking “the peace of God which transcends all human understanding, and which will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus”. [Philippians 4:7]

I guess that my Tuesday night dream was preparation for Sandy’s Wednesday morning message. Ich habe angst.  Which is something that will not go away quickly. Closure is an unhelpful concept. Which suggests letting go of an event and forgetting it. When the more Christian response is, I think, to invite God into our apprehension and disappointments and fears, and to ask for his peace in our hearts.

Maundy Thursday, 

April 2023

Heavyweight boxing

I’ve never had any real interest in boxing, not at any weight. I think the last fight in which I showed any interest was in February 1964, when Cassius Clay, as he was then known, a glib, fast-talking challenger from Louisville, Kentucky, got in the ring with the fearsome Sonny Liston. And won the world heavyweight title for the first time when Liston failed to come out of his corner at the beginning of the seventh round.

Several years before that, when I was still at primary school, there was what must have been a very modest bookshop in Replingham Road, in Southfields, the suburb in south-west London where I grew up. Other shops on the same street included Thorpe’s, a tobacconist and  sweet-shop [Charlie Thorpe once gave my brother and me a cigar each for Christmas, which rather miffed my father.] And Christmas the chemist. [Who gave Paul and me some screw-top aluminium containers for tea and sugar when we went hitch-hiking in France in 1961. Did his daughter become a journalist on The Guardian ? Or did I dream that ?]

Anyway this little bookshop had some paperback books outside on a display rack. Which I assumed were there for me to read. So I read quite a lot of The Scourge of the Swastika, a best-selling history of Nazi war crimes by Lord Russell of Liverpool, a former Judge Advocate.   And I also read most of a book on world champion heavyweight boxers. From which I learned that the two greatest champions  [the term GOAT was still several decades in the future] were Jack Johnson, the ‘Galveston Giant’, the American world champion in the early years of the twentieth century, and Joe Louis, another Afro-American heavyweight, who was world champion from 1937 to 1949.

In black and white

Donald McRae is a South African journalist who used to live in Southfields. Much more recently than me.  He wrote a book Winter Colours, about South African and New Zealand rugby, and about the professionalisation of rugby in the 1990s, which was described as “the best book about rugby ever written”. That may have been the book that encouraged us to call one of our Lyon cats Josh, after Josh Kronfeld, the New Zealand back-row forward. It won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award in 1998. The book, not the cat ! And last autumn I enjoyed reading his book In Black and White, the story of the first two black American super-stars, Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. But I didn’t write anything about it at the time because I was preoccupied with other things; with Joanna, and the Men’s Retreat, and preparing for a locum spell at St Peters, Chantilly.

Jesse Owens was a slim, 5”10”, 165 pounds, born in 1913 into a sharecropping community in northern Alabama. James Cleveland [J.C.] Owens was his parents’ tenth and last child, sickly as a baby from repeated bouts of pneumonia. His grandfather was a slave. In 1923 the family fled from fraught, black life in Oakville, Alabama, and headed north to Cleveland, Ohio. At East Tech High School in Cleveland Jesse won seventy eight of the seventy nine races he ran in. Jesse was signed up by Ohio State university and became a stand-out member of their athletics team. In June 1935 at the national collegiate meeting, Jesse won the 100-yard and 220-yard sprint, the 220-yard low hurdles and the long jump. He scored forty of Ohio State’s forty-one points; and single-handedly earned more points than such college teams as UCLA, Notre Dame, Princeton, Yale and Harvard. A month later he married his childhood sweetheart, Minnie Ruth Solomon.

Joe Louis was another young black American, the same age as Jesse Owens. His family too had moved north from the dangerous rawness of Alabama. In 1934-35 Joe Louis won twenty two consecutive fights, eighteen by knock-out. His support team was a rare all black entourage; Roxy was a cultured hustler, who ran a numbers racket in Detroit; Mr Black was a qualified embalmer who ran a speak-easy in Chicago. The poker-faced Joe was quickly taken up by a posse of Hollywood stars; Bojangles Robinson, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, and Mae West. In June 1935, at the Yankee Stadium in New York Joe demolished the giant Italian Primo Carnera [aka The Man Mountain, The Gorgonzola Tower]. He had won his first big fight in New York. People were on their feet screaming his name. For the International New Service, Davis Walsh wrote: “Something sly and sinister and perhaps not quite human came out of the African jungle tonight to strike down and utterly demolish Primo Carnera, the giant …”.

Jesse Owens and Joe Louis had suddenly become national stars and role models. “If athletic greatness was a gift to be bestowed at will”, Bill Henry wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “the coloured race couldn’t have chosen two more remarkable men than Jesse Owens and Joe Louis to be its outstanding representatives. Owens … as the greatest track-and-field athlete of all time … Same goes for ‘Dead Pan’ Joe Louis whose decisive defeat of Carnera has sent scribes scurrying to their dictionaries in search of superlatives … … it is a pretty tough test of character. Owens arrived at the threshold of notoriety achieved by few young men, Now Louis, another Negro, is thrust in front of the gawking, staring world, eager to hail him, spoil him, and, if possible, ruin him.””

August in Berlin

In July 1936 Jesse Owens set sail for Berlin on the SS Manhattan, one of nineteen Negroes on the US team. For nine days the athletes lived in Third Class on Deck D below the water line, while the team officials cruised far above in First Class. During the voyage Eleanor Jarrett, the beautiful twenty two year old swimmer from Brooklyn, the femme fatale of the team was expelled from the team by Avery [Slavery] Brundage for being very publicly drunk on champagne. Brundage was an autocratie ex-Olympian decathlete who had made a fortune in the construction industry,

Hitler opened the Olympic Games on August 1st, 1936. They were to be an international showpiece for the German Reich; recorded for posterity by the young film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, best known for her luminous depiction of the Nazi rally in Nuremberg. Hitler and his entourage attended the games each day in anticipation of celebrating the triumphs of German athletes. On August 2nd, Hitler and his contingent left their box hastily as Jesse Owens and Dave Allbritton, both Negroes, won gold and silver medals in the high jump. On Saturday, August 8th, the US 4 x 100 yards relay team, with Jesse running the first leg, won the gold medal and broke the world record. Jesse Owens had become the first man in history to win four gold medals.

Joe Louis and Max Schmeling

In June 1937, at Comiskey Park, Chicago, Joe Louis knocked out James Braddock to become the new heavyweight champion of the world. And the second black champion in history. Across Chicago and all of America black crowds clustered around radios and loudspeakers shouting ‘Joe Louis … champion …  Joe Louis … champion’.  A year later, in the Yankee Stadium, New York, Joe fought the experienced and dangerous German heavyweight Max Schmeling. Who had knocked out Joe in a brutal fight two years earlier. The rematch in June 1938 attracted enormous publicity, and gave rise to unpleasant taunts of nationalism and racialism. In a ghosted, syndicated newspaper column, Joe Louis declared: “Tonight I not only fight the battle of my life to revenge the lone blot on my record. But I fight for America against the challenge of a foreign invader, Max Schmeling. This isn’t just one man against another, or Joe Louis boxing Max Schmeling; its the good old USA versus Germany”.

It was a massacre. Joe Louis crushed Max Schmeling in just two minutes and four seconds. The Nazis abruptly shut down the live broadcast in Germany. Duke Ellington was one of many at the ringside who was bewildered by the speed of the victory: “I dropped my goddamn straw hat … it was rolling around by my feet. I was just trying to pick it up so I can sit down and watch Joe … And then all of a sudden  they all start jumping and hollering. I can’t fucking believe it. The goddamn fight is over”. Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.

Black days

After the Berlin Olympics Jesse never raced again. He and the other amateur athletes made thousands of dollars for the AAU. Commercial sponsors made Jesse all kinds of offers. And the millionaire Avery Brundage had him suspended for breaking the rules on amateurism. So he spent the next few years racing against ice skaters and greyhounds and in Havana, Cuba, a thoroughbred racehorse called Julio McCaw. The Olympic champion had become a circus act. He was almost as fast as he had been as Olympic champion, but he was reduced to racing against motor-cycles and double-decker buses. In May 1939 with the collapse of his Jesse Owens Dry Cleaning Company [his partners took him to the cleaners] he was declared bankrupt.

Joe Louis was in a similar situation. After defeating Schmeling in 1938, he had a busy two years fighting a series of forgotten challengers, who came to known as the ‘Bum of the Month Club’. But his appetite for food and for showgirls was insatiable. His annual income was $250,000, but by July 1941 he was $100,000 in debt to his promoter and manager, and he owed the tax-man almost another $100,000. And Marva, his long-suffering wife, left him.

Both Joe and Jesse served in the US army in the Second World War. When Joe was discharged  from the US army in 1945 and fought Billy Conn, he was $210,000 in debt, a mix of taxes and alimony payments. In September 1950, at the age of thirty six, Joe was humiliated by the younger and lighter Ezzard Charles. A year later, in an ill-advised come-back he was badly beaten by the young slugger Rocky Marciano. Sugar Ray Robinson and Josephine Baker wept openly in his dressing room. Joe never got in the boxing ring again.

Donald McRae tells the story well; the meteoric rise and slow fall of two black super-stars. By 1954 Jesse had been voted by an Associated Press Poll as the greatest athlete of the past fifty years and was now Secretary of the Illinois State Athletic Commission. But J. Edgar Hoover was ordering an urgent investigation into him as one of the “commies, reds, pinkos, and niggers” who were plotting America’s downfall. And in the 1960s the federal government accused him of failing to file income tax returns and of several years of systematic tax evasion.

Joe meanwhile had hit the skids; owed over $1,000,000 in taxes, and had a brief and unsuccessful spell as a professional wrestler. A low point from which he was eventually rescued by his third marriage to Martha Jefferson, a black attorney from California, who became his wife, lawyer, cook, mistress, press agent, valet de chambre, and tax consultant.

Envoi

Joe Louis and Jesse Owens both died at the age of sixty-six. Jesse died of cancer in Tucson in March 1980. Later that day Simon Wiesenthal proposed that the avenue leading to the Olympic Stadium in Berlin should be renamed Jesse Owens Avenue. Joe died in March 1981. His body ‘lay in state’ at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas; Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr sang at his funeral, and the eulogy was pronounced by the Revd Jesse Jackson. 

After Jesse’s death, the Detroit Free Press reprinted an article by him:

“After the Olympic Games in Berlin, I came back to my country and I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door … … and of course Joe Louis and I were the first modern sports figures who were black. So neither of us could do any national advertising because the South wouldn’t buy it … … when Joe and I came along, blacks in America had no image … … We agreed the only way to help our people was by deeds. We didn’t make waves. We were called Uncle Toms later. But the 1960s were something else. Back then, our way was the only way.”

Is everything different now ? As this book wants to suggest. Certainly Obama was the first [very impressive] black President of the United States. And here in the UK, the three most important offices of state are held by [the rather less impressive] Rishi Sunak, James Cleverly, and Suella Braverman. Respectively the son of African-born parents of Punjabi descent, the son of parents from Britain and Sierra Leon, and the daughter of parents of Indian descent who were immigrants from Mauritius and from Kenya. [Which makes me wonder how many of them would have been welcomed into the UK under present rules by this present government.]

But the Black Lives Matter movement, founded in 2013, came into being specifically to highlight and to combat racism, discrimination, and racial inequality suffered by black people. While here in the UK the Casey Report, published only last month found the Metropolitan Police guilty of institutional racism, misogyny, and homophobia. 

Jesse Owens and Joe Louis gained victories that raised a banner for the disenfranchised black population of America. But I guess the struggle is by no means over.

April 2023

A walk along the Western Front

When my younger brother Peter was diagnosed with a brain tumour, a couple of years ago, I thought I would go on a long walk as a kind of pilgrimage. The Camino to Santiago de Compostella was the obvious choice. I got as far as buying a couple of guide books, and I signed up for a group from the Edinburgh Diocese who were walking the [significantly shorter] Camino Ingles last May. But it didn’t happen because it clashed with a twice postponed three-family holiday in Normandy. Which with hindsight was our last ever holiday with Joanna.

Our son Jem gave me Anthony Seldon’s 2022 book The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way for Christmas. A perfect gift as it  combines walking, France, and the First World War. And I have just finished reading it. Seldon is a shameless self-publicist and seemingly driven by ambition.  He was successively headmaster at Brighton College and then at Wellington College, and then had a job at the [private] University of Buckingham. Along the way he has written, or co-authored, a good number of books, including biographies of most recent prime ministers, from Margaret Thatcher to Boris Johnson. As the book starts in 2021 Seldon has lost his wife Joanna to cancer, and stepped away from his job at Buckingham and the house that went with it. No wife, no job, no house. So the walk, of about a thousand kilometres, is a challenge and a personal odyssey.

From the Swiss border to Verdun

He chooses to walk northwards from the Swiss border and the Vosges mountains towards the sea. Which means starting in Alsace, where very few British and Allied forces were involved.  And which was the only part of the Western Front where fighting took place on [what was after the annexation of 1871] German soil. The first French and German soldiers be killed in the war, Corporal Jules-André Peugeot and Lieutenant Albert Mayer, were both killed in a skirmish near Illfurth on August 2nd, 1914, even before war had been officially declared. The Vosges saw brutal and sustained fighting from late 1914 to late 1915, though these battles are little known in Britain. Here there fighting took place not in trenches but on exposed rocks and in extensive pine forests. Hartmannswillerkopf , a summit which changed hands regularly in 1915, is one of the four National Monuments that the French built after the war; the others being at Verdun, on the Marne, and at Notre Dame de Lorette, north of Arras in Artois.

Seldon generally is walking alone. But has back-up support from Sarah, a teaching colleague and French speaker, who will become his second wife. And he uses his phone to check regularly on the Test score at Lords, where Sam Curran a former pupil at Wellington is making his England debut. At night his sleeping is patchy; alcohol helps him to sleep, dehydration keeps him awake. He reflects that soldiers survived in the trenches for several days with very little sleep. He reflects that 449 British soldiers were sentence to death for sleeping on watch. But only two were carried out. But 346 soldiers were court-martialled and ‘shot at dawn’ for a variety of crimes, including cowardice and disobedience to lawful command, and most often for desertion.

In Lorraine Selsdon is troubled  by blistered feet. At Saint-Mihiel there is mention for the first time of the American Expeditionary Force [AEF] under General John Pershing. Some 116,000 American soldiers died during the First World War, far more than the numbers killed in Vietnam. But the United States is more attached to the memory of the Second World War; and it was only in 2021 that a memorial to the First World War was unveiled on the National Mall in Washington DC. Not far away is where Alain Fournier, author of Le Grand Meaulnes, was killed in September 1914.

From Verdun to the sea

Verdun for the French symbolises the tragic cost of the First World War, as do the Battles of the Somme and Passchendaele for the British. Ringed with a cluster of forts to the north and east Verdun was the strongest defensive position on the whole of the Western Front. But in February 1916 Douaumont, the strongest of the forts, fell bloodlessly into German hands. Nearby in March 1916 Charles de Gaulle was bayonetted in the thigh, gassed, and take prisoner. On the day Douamont fell, General Philippe Petain was recalled to take command at Verdun. He had a reputation for not wasting French soldiers’ lives. For months the city and the whole Verdun salient was supplied with food and ammunition by heroic convoys along the Voie Sacrée from Bar-le-Duc. In 2006 the [narrow and winding] road was renamed RD1916. Above the cemetery at Verdun stands the ossuary, a bleak building containing the remains of 130,000 French and German soldiers recovered from the battle-field in the early post-war years. At Verdun Seldon is bitten by a farm dog, and recalls that his mother’s first husband died of a rabid dog-bite in India.

Douaumont ossuary, Verdun

In spite of badly blistered and raw feet, Seldon presses on through Champagne-Argonne. Near the ossuary at Navarin is Souain, where four French corporals were shot for cowardice in March 1915. It was this shameful episode that inspired the 1935 anti-war novel Paths of Glory, which was subsequently filmed by Stanley Kubrick starring Kirk Douglas. From Rheims Seldon takes two days off for his daughter’s wedding down in the Dordogne. On his return he limps on towards the Aisle and the Marne. Robert Nivelle succeeded Joffre as Commander in Chief in December 1916. His ambitious offensive, the Second Battle of the Aisne, the following year had allowed for some 10,000 French casualties. In the event the toll was 130,000. And Nivelle was sacked and replaced by the more cautious Pétain. Near Berry-au-Bac the National Tank Museum occupies a large roundabout in the middle of a trunk road. This is close to the beginning of the Chemin des Dames, which follows the D18 along a ridge above the Aisle. Craonne is a village détruit, which inspired the song Chanson de Craonne, which gained fame among the exhausted poilus:

Goodbye to life, goodbye to love, goodbye to all the women,

Its all over now, we’ve had it for good with his awful war,

We’ve had it for good with this awful war …

We’re the ones they’re sacrificing …

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to explore this terrain last September [see TaGD, 82]. On that occasion I visited the underground museum at the Caverne du Dragon, and even have a hoodie to go with it.

Victory on the Marne

The feet are worse as Seldon limps on into Picardy. He passes the Chateau de Blérancourt, the headquarters of the American Committee for Devastated France, founded by the feisty Ann Morgan, daughter of J. Pierpoint Morgan, the American banker. It is now a museum dedicated to Franco-American relations down the centuries. [It was very firmly closed the last time I was there.]

As Seldon moves north the place names and the battle-fields become more familiar to the British. The Battle of the Somme in July 1916 was conceived in part at Joffre’s request  torelieve the pressure on Verdun. Douglas Haig seemingly believed that a preliminary seven-day shelling of the German trenches would massively weaken the enemy defences and destroy their guns. It didn’t. The opening day of the Somme saw 19,300 British soldiers dead and 60,000 casualties. The worst day in British military history. Seldon stays in a hotel in Albert, known for the golden statue of Mary with the infant Jesus on top of the basilica. When a shell struck the statue leaving it hanging precariously, the British believed that if it fell the war would immediately end. The poet Ivor Gurney marched past the statue in 1916. After the war he was institutionalised in a mental hospital, where he died in 1937. He is buried in the churchyard at Twigworth, outside Gloucester, next door to a B&B where Susie and I stayed a few years ago, Few people visit his grave.

In September 1916 the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, visited the Somme battlefield. At Fricourt he met up with his son Raymond, who was killed nearby at Ginchy one week later. There is a monument to him in the cathedral at Amiens. [See TaGD, 91.] Seldon notes that four British Prime Ministers fought in the First World War: Clement Attlee, who fought at Gallipoli; Churchill, who following his demotion after the Dardanelles served as  lieutenant colonel in the Royal Scots Fusiliers; Antony Eden, who fought at Delville Wood, on the Somme; and Harold Macmillan, who was severely wounded at Ginchy on the day that Raymond Asquith was killed. He wonders whether Blair and Cameron might have been more reluctant to intervene in the Middle East, or whether Boris Johnson would have been so eager to tear up international treaties, if any of them had experienced the horrors of war themselves. [And it is worth noting that the only two Prime Ministers who fought in the Second Word War, Ted Heath and Jim Callaghan, were both strongly pro-European.]

Thiepval memorial, The Somme

Seldon also reflects on he way in which the Somme influenced the imagination of many writers.

“‘There are dead things, dead faces in the water”, he said with horror. “”dead faces … they lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep under the dark water. I saw them; grim faces and evil, ad noble faces and sad … But all foul, all rotting. all dead.”’

These are the words of Sam Gamgee and Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Presumably inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s four months fighting on the Somme between July and October 1916.

Envoi

I enjoyed the book. But I found Seldon difficult to like. The journey is punctuated by requests for interviews from Radio Four [about Prince Charles’s valet among other things !] and by the need to correct proofs for his articles for e.g. The Times Literary Supplement. The impression is of a man shamelessly ambitious and spreading himself a bit thin. But I admire the way he presses on with severely raw and blistered feet, and a couple of unhappy visits to French hospitals. On Day Thirty Eight, he arrives at Nieuwpoort, smothered in antiseptic and plasters, Lynx deodorant and insect repellent, now walking in company with the UK Ambassador to Belgium and his Defence Attaché. And then he rushes home on Eurostar to speak at a literary festival.

For several years I have wanted to take a careful look at the First War battlefields. In May 2015, just after leaving Holy Trinity, Brussels, I joined a small group of Old Blues to lay wreaths at the graves of Old Blues who were killed in the war. We started at Ypres, where we attended the evening ceremony at the Menin Gate, and from where we visited Tyne Cot and Passchendaele. And then we drove south to visit the monument at Thiepval, and the Ulster Tower, and thence to Arras and Cambrai. A year earlier I had guested on an outing to Flanders with the Belgian Branch of the National Trust under the leadership of Nick Fern.  We had lunch in Poperinghe, followed by an excellent tour of Messines with a local New Zealander as our guide. Much more recently, last September, I had a day exploring sites on the Chemin des Dames.

Wreath laying at Tyne Cot, 2015

Would I be up for walking the Western Front Way ? Sadly, probably not. It’s too far for me to walk, and I do not have Seldon’s drivenness. But I’d be happy to do bits of it. If we go back to Chantilly at some point, which is not a given, perhaps I could find a group of people to walk for a day or two along the Aisne battlefields, maybe starting near Craonne. But, according to Seldon, the way is better sign-posted in Belgium. Perhaps the Holy Trinity walking group might organise a day or two walking north from Ploegsteert [Plug Street to the British troops] towards Ypres and the sea. If they ever do, I’d be up for that.

March 2023 

Coming home

I got back home to Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago, after spending a bit over a couple of months in Chantilly, doing locum ministry at St Peter’s Church. Susie got home a week later. She had spent from September to January down in Wycombe, close to Joanna and Craig, and to Jem and Anna, and their families. And then she was back down in Wycombe again in February helping with the grand-children during their half-term.

With hindsight I am a bit ambivalent about my time in Chantilly. Susie and I had committed months earlier to being there from Advent Sunday through to the middle of February. But she stayed in Wycombe so I went by myself. I think I wanted to feel that I was doing something useful. And the congregation at St Peter’s were appreciative and hospitable. But outwith Sundays I spent quite a lot of time walking round the race-course and along the canal. And listening to Lectio 365. Should I have come back to Wycombe to be with Joanna sooner ? The answer is probably yes. Joanna Trollope’s phrase comes to mind: “A vicar is a man who is aways away being wonderful somewhere else.”

Direct fights from Paris to Edinburgh were all full, so I flew back via Amsterdam. On the second leg a KLM air-hostess to whom I’d spoken briefly on the first leg made a point of bringing me a cup of tea and a slice of cake. For which I was very grateful. By contrast Edinburgh’s very good public transport system was a bit lacking. My tram from the airport threw us off at Shandwick Place because of works on the track in the town centre. After which the driver of my 30 bus failed to stop when requested at Marchhall Crescent. And when I  remonstrated he was abusive. Very unusual since most Edinburgh bus drivers are friendly and very patient.

The house felt a bit cold and unfriendly when I arrived. Which isn’t surprising since neither of us have lived here much since last September. I am grateful for a heating system that works. We were customers of the now defunct Bulb energy supplier, but have transitioned to Octopus without any visible change. Before Susie’s return I was living off Sainsbury’s packet asparagus soup with croutons. With the occasional treat of fish pie. The ultimate comfort food. And reading Donna Leon, who is the fictional equivalent. I think she is an excellent writer. Apart from the delights of the Venetian background, I love the dynamics of Brunetti’s relationships with his wife and children, and then with his colleagues at the Questura. Most prominently with Signorina Elettra. 

A day out

Susie’s train from King’s Cross was over two hours late, problems caused by a signals failure at Morpeth. So she was re-routed via Carlisle. I walked round Princes Street and George Street noting the shops that are no longer there. Jenners of course has been empty for some time, and a fireman was killed in a blaze there while we were away. The Edinburgh Bookshop [more recently Waterstone’s] has gone from George Street. And I am sorry that Fopp’s has gone too..

For Susie’s birthday we took a Car Club car down to Berwick on Tweed, taking the scenic route through Gifford and over the Lammermuir Hills. I remember walking several times from Longformacus up past the reservoir to Twin Law Cairn. And we also remembered Joanna doing her Duke of Edinburgh award scheme hike, camping up there on a very cold November night. As we came though Duns I reflected that Joanna spent nearly a quarter of her life here.

In Berwick we ate in The Maltings, the cafe attached to the theatre and arts centre. Good food and a good view over the roofs of the lower town. The last time we were here, about eighteen months ago, we were with my younger brother, Peter, who died last year. And there was time after to call at Northern Edge, a high-class coffee roaster, and to walk round the town ramparts in a cold east wind.

The state of the nation

I haven’t wanted to write anything about UK politics since the demise of blustering Boris and the, thankfully short-lived, era of the gormless Liz Truss. Now the departure of the saintly Nicola has occasioned a lot of comment. I think Sturgeon was a hard-working and sympathetic politician, who handled COVID well, and was a huge improvement on her predecessor the shifty Alex Salmond. But I fear that standards in education and in health-care have gone backwards under the SNP. My best guess is that enthusiasm for independence has peaked, and that Sturgeon’s departure will ultimately benefit the Labour party. Part of me is delighted that Kate Forbes, a professing Christian who is happy to voice her Christian beliefs, may be the next [very young] leader.

The stop press news is that Rishi Sunak is selling the new Windsor Agreement on the grounds that Northern Ireland will benefit enormous from gaining access to the Single [European] Market. Which makes me wonder why the rest of the UK can’t enjoy that benefit too ! Wycombe’s MP, the ardent Brexiteer Steve Baker, has seen the light. I wonder if other ERG members, the unspeakable Rees-Mogg and Lance Corporal Mark Francois, will vote against the deal. And, if they do, whether Rishi will remove the government whip from them.  Just asking. Hopefully.

February 2023

A day out in Amiens

Amiens is the biggest city in France that I have never visited. At least not until today. And the cathedral is [said to be] the biggest in France. So, although I had promised myself a trip to the coast, possibly to Dieppe or up to Ostend, I had a more modest day outing to Amiens. Which involved setting my alarm on a very frosty [-5º overnight] morning. And a walk down to the station in glorious sunshine across the race-course.

French railways are currently hit by strikes over Macron’s new pension plans. But trains seemed to running normally. It is just over an hour to Amiens on the train from Chantilly.I like the two storey carriages in France, even on a humble TER. The upper compartment was nearly full, with a significant number of black Africans, who may or may not have been refugees, who mostly got out at Creil. One African opposite me was sound asleep; when the ticket collector woke him up it transpired out that he had missed his stop. And also that he had no ticket.

The cathedral

Amiens has a long pedestrian street leading from the railway station towards the centre of town. It is architecturally undistinguished with a predictable collection of shops, Hema, Jeff de Bruges etc. Nothing prepares you for a first glimpse of the Notre Dame cathedral. It is enormous, 145 metres long, and said to be the biggest church in France. It is essentially a 13th century church, built between 1220 and 1269 in the [high] Gothic style. The interior of the church includes two 13th century recumbent statues of former bishops; a 13th century labyrinth, engraved with the names of the architects; and some very elaborate 16th century choir stalls and choir screens. But the main impression of the interior is the height of the roof and the height-width ratio of the central aisle; 

The use of such features as external supporting systems, cross vaults and arches, and external buttresses allowed Gothic buildings to reach huge heights. During the great cathedral building era, builders competed to achieve the highest vaults: at Laon they are 24 metres above the ground, in Paris they are 33.5 metres, at Reims they reach 38 metres, and here in Amiens they reach 41.2 metres. The only higher cathedral vault is St Peter’s at Beauvais, just up the road from here, at 48 metres, which was never completed.

In the cathedral at Amiens I was surprised to come across a wall tablet commemorating Raymond Asquith, who was killed at nearby Guinchy in September 1916. He was the eldest son of the Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, a distinguished scholar at Winchester and Balliol, a barrister, and the leader of an Edwardian group of socialites and intellectuals known as La Coterie. Raymond Asquith was an officer in the Grenadier Guards, who was shot in the chest at Guinchy and buried at Guillemont. Winston Churchill later wrote in an obituary of him:

“It seemed quite easy for Raymond Asquith, when the time came, to face death and to die. When I saw him at the Front he seemed to move through the cold, squalor and peril of the winter trenches as if he were above and immune from the common ills of the flesh, a being clad in polished armour, entirely undisturbed, presumably invulnerable. The War which found the measure of so many, never got to the bottom of him, and when the Grenadiers strode into the crash and thunder of the Somme, he went to his fate cool, poised, resolute, matter of fact, debonair. And well we know that his father, then bearing the supreme burden of the State, would proudly have marched at his side”

Raymond Asquith was a very superior person. But, I suspect, more admired than liked.

Before I left the cathedral I lit a candle for Joanna. It’s not something that I can remember doing before. But I know that other people have been lighting candles for  her. And it seemed like the right thing to do.

Les Hortillonages

The tourist office is close to the west front of the cathedral. Three helpful young people behind a desk, but no other tourists. One of the three gave me a city plan, highlighting the areas I should try to see, while his colleague sold me a couple of postcards.

One of the distinctive features of Amiens is Les Hortillonages, an extensive area of water gardens and market gardens. There are said to be 300 hectares of these gardens and more than 60 kilometres of rieux, or water channels. [Amiens like other places, including Birmingham and Bruges, was once known as ‘the Venice of the north’.] Once upon a time this was where the townspeople grew vegetables, which formed the basis of the reputed  Hortillonages soup.  And apparently there is still a Saturday morning vegetable market in the Saint Leu district.

My tourist office plan was a bit lacking in detail. But I walked for a mile or so along the Chemin de Halage beside the river Somme. There are a random collection of houses and cottages  set back from the river bank, each approached via its own gated bridge over a subsidiary bit of the river. No two bridges are the same. Car access is for riverains only. There are occasional house boats moored, and some impressive willow trees. Apart from occasionally joggers the road was very quiet. It was a bit like walking alongside the Thames from Binsey towards The Trout. 

Returning by the same route there are good views of Amiens across the river, with the cathedral and the [hideously ugly] Tour Perret, France’s first skyscraper, dominating the skyline. This tower, built in early modernist style, was the first 100-plus metre tower in France. It was designed by Auguste Perret as part of a post-war reconstruction project. And sits close to the railway station.

Envoi

I had a decent lunch in a restaurant on the Quai Bélu with a view of both the river and the cathedral. In the strong winter sunshine. Up until now I have always imagined Amiens as a rather grey, dour, mist-shrouded city. An image that I may have gleaned from Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong. In truth the sun may not shine there very often. But it was an excellent day out. If and when I go again, I hope to see something of the Jules Verne quarter and possibly venture into the Musée de Picardie.

February 2023

Joanna McDonald

Last Wednesday, one week ago today, on January 25th, we had the Committal service for our daughter, Joanna McDonald, and then in the afternoon a service of Thanksgiving at King’s Church, Wycombe. What follows is an edited version of what I said at that service.

Prelude

Funerals are always difficult. As we come together in an unfamiliar place with a mix of strong emotions. And a powerful sense of loss.At funerals you meet people you don’t see very often, and sometimes you have difficulty remembering their names.

Children should not die before their parents. Not ever.

Nothing at theological college prepares you for the funeral of your own child. So I’ll say two important things first – in case I can’t continue.

First, Joanna was the best and the bravest and the most beautiful daughter in the world. Beautiful on the outside, as the photos we will see this afternoon will  attest. And beautiful on the inside too. If I can quote just one of the 150+ tributes on her Facebook page, Joanna Clare, from someone I don’t know:  “Those of us who were privileged to know Joanna and call her a friend will all agree that she undoubtedly was the kindest, gentlest, most giving human we’re ever likely to meet …”

Thanks

Secondly, I want to thank three people, or groups of people, for what they did for her:

Craig, was a rock [as his name indicates] these past months; coping tirelessly with the triple roles of husband, father, and medical doctor; and commuting daily from Wycombe to Florence House.

Florence Nightingale Hospice, Stoke Mandeville, to use their proper name, looked after Joanna wonderfully well during the last 4 weeks and 2 days of her life. Nothing was too much for them – nurses, doctors, craft assistants, and the lovely Thai chef. And Pete, the Stoke Mandeville lay chaplain was a great support. 

And thirdly, thank you to the community of Kings Church. Wycombe. who not only prayed their socks off for Joanna and the family many weeks; but who also supplied much practical support, a constant stream of food, lifts for children, drinks, dropping the children off, love, and more food for Craig and Amelia and Eloise when Joanna was not there.

Memories: 1

I knew Joanna for all of her all too short life on this earth,

In December, with her agreement, I went down to Paris for the day to inspect the building where she was born, Notre Dame du Bon Secours. And to see if there was a blue plaque on the building saying Joanna Martin est née ici le 10 mars, 1977.  As I reported to Joanna subsequently, not only was there no plaque, but there was no wall either ! The site no longer a Maternity Unit, but a psycho-geriatric hospital. Which will no doubt serve as a sermon illustration one day.

Although it sometimes pleased Joanna to think that she was ‘une vraie titie parisenne’, we moved back to England when she was nine months old. She spent the first ten years of her life not very far away from here, in Woodstock in Oxfordshire.

Before we left Paris, Joanna was baptised by Malcolm White in the Eglise Réformée in the rue de l’Ouest on a sunny day in 1977. It was Malcolm’s first baptism. And Joanna’s too ! [I think it is fair to say that in latter years we were not entirely sure that her baptism was kosher, as I had understood that Malcolm was not totally convinced about infant baptism. So when a dozen or more years later she wanted to be confirmed, she was conditionally re-baptised by full immersion in the Brethren chapel at Chirnside in the Scottish Borders. Which presumably satisfied even King’s Church Wycombe’s policy on initiation !]

She was a first child. And showed some of the attributes of first children. She was biddable, liking to please her parents;  she worked hard at learning new skills – walking, and reading; and was quite precocious with her vocabulary. Somewhere there is a tape of her aged about 18 months saying DAADDIE – CARR – BARCELONAH – SHOOTCASE. I remembered that when she was  ill … and walked up the road in Edinburgh with tears in my eyes. Which has been a regular occurrence these past few weeks and months.

Joanna was a bit late walking, preferring to be carried. But she was an early reader, taught by Susie from the backs of cereal packets.  Word is that she couldn’t at first tell SAINSBURY’S from WAITROSE But those were long words for a very little girl. She started school at Woodstock Primary School. Where she got what was to be a succession of extraordinarily good reports. Commenting as much on her attitude and her helpfulness as on her scholastic work.

Memories: 2

We moved to Scotland, to Edinburgh, when she was just 11; and to Duns in the Scottish Borders 2 years later. In consequence, she spent 4 school years running in 4 different schools; upper primary in Woodstock; upper primary in Edinburgh, at Gylemuir; first year secondary in Edinburgh, at Craigmount; second year secondary in Duns, at Berwickshire High School. It didn’t seem to phase her. She continued to get excellent reports, and sailed through standard grades and then highers. She played the flute and the piano. She played flute in the church music group. And with the Borders Schools band. She was part of Duns Crusader group. With the High School she went ski-ing in Italy; and on a school exchange to Saint-Brieuc in Brittany.  In 1995 she was happy to go to Edinburgh to do French and Italian and European Union studies. 

We missed her when she went off to uni in 1995. But at first she wasn’t that far away in Edinburgh. At uni she made a lot of good friends. Including Craig, with whom she sang in a Christian choir. Early in her student days she committed to ECF [Edinburgh Christian Fellowship] in Edinburgh, which later morphed into CCE [Community Church Edinburgh]. In 1997-98 she did an Erasmus year at Grenoble. Where she worshipped at St Marc’s as part of their Round Twenty group. 

For someone who had been quite cautious as a little girl [seeking the reassurance of her brother], she was very brave. At uni she flew off to Grenoble, to be met by a friend of her god-mothers’s daughter. In autumn 2000, a year after graduating, Joanna flew off by herself to Nepal, to work for 8 months as a science teacher in a Mission School in Katmandu. [Word is that she was at least one chapter ahead of her pupils.] Happily Craig was not far away, and they returned at the end of the year having got engaged at Annapurna Base Camp. 

Memories: 3

Their wedding in August 2002 at CCE was a splendid occasion. Joanna was a radiant bride. My mother said Joanna was ‘the happiest bride” she’d ever seen.  Music in the service was excellent. the bridal couple zoomed off in red, white, and blue Minis. Followed by the Reception at Carberry Tower: men in kilts, speeches, good food, plenty of wine, a high class ceilidh band.

What followed is for others to tell. Joanna and Craig were very happily married for 20 years last year. She worked first in Edinburgh for the Scottish Office. She said that she’d always wanted to be a civil servant. Which may sound odd. But which would have delighted her paternal grandmother. After she and Craig moved south, she worked for DFiD, the Department for International Development. This included a brief spell in Dhaka in Bangladesh. [I remember saying to her, as an anxious father, ‘I’m concerned about how you will get around in Dhaka, on public transport and so on’. She sought to reassure me, ’Don’t worry, I have a car and a driver’. And when I asked her about food shopping and cooking, she told me: ‘Don’t worry, I have a cook who will do that sort of thing !’Later on she and Craig spent a year in Pretoria in South Africa. We were fortunate enough to be able to visit them there; living in that beautiful country in a gated community behind razor wire and a security fence. Susie and I travelled with Joanna down to Cape Town, one of the world’s great cities. And caught a 50th anniversary tour of Cliff Richard and the Shadows in Kirstenbosch botanical gardens. When she finally left DFiD, she was involved in setting up AZALEA, the women’s charity associated with this church.

Although she hadn’t lived with us at home for twenty five years we were always pleased to meet up. In Scotland, in France, in South Africa; on holidays in Wales and in Somerset and most recently in Normandy. And I remember with pleasure her coming to Paris for the day with a very young Amelia; and again overnight to Brussels with a very young Eloise.

Where is God in all this ?

Why has Joanna died so young ? Dozens, if not hundreds, of people were praying for her ? Did God not hear our prayers ? It is a question that echoes down the years. The problem is classically formulated by David Hume: “Is God willing to prevent evil but not able ? … Is he able to prevent evil but not willing ? … Is he both able and willing ?”

I have been a Church of England vicar for the past thirty years,  and I don’t have the answer to these questions. But we acknowledge that in scripture there is as much lament s there is thanksgiving. And we may want to reflect on the lament contained in Psalm 22:

“My God, my God why have you forsaken me ?

The words of my groaning do nothing to save me.

My God I call by day but you do not answer;

at night, but I find no respite.”

The Psalmist’s strength is ebbing away; he is surrounded by enemies. As many of you know, these are words quoted by Jesus on the Cross.

It is not my job to justify God’s actions or his inaction. But I think the Christian response to this cry comes in the next Psalm:

‘The Lord’s my shepherd; therefore I lack nothing …

By tranquil streams he leads me to restore my spirit …

Even were I to walk in a ravine as dark as death,

I should fear no danger; for you are by my side.”

We are going to sing Stuart Townend’s version of that psalm, Psalm 23, in a few minutes time

I want to believe that the Lord is very close to Joanna today.

And that, while we here are bereft, she is safely enfolded in his arms; comforted by his presence; and assured of his love. Someone sent Susie an image they had: of Joanna with a group of other women, sitting on a sofa with her legs folded under here, bathed in warm sun light, drinking tea and talking to Jesus. 

Envoi

I’m not a great Kenneth Branagh fan, but there is a moving scene in the film Belfast. Young Buddy’s much loved grandfather [played by Ciaran Hinds] dies, and at his graveside the really not-very-attractive [Protestant] priest says: “Do not mourn for this man today. Mourn instead for yourselves,  for your loss.. And give thanks rather for having known him.”

So today, here this morning and in a different setting this afternoon, we pray for Craig and for Amelia and for Eloise and for all who mourn.

And we give thanks for Joanna, the person we knew and loved; the best and the bravest and the most beautiful daughter in the world.

I will miss her every day for the rest of my life.

February 2023