This year the poppy people have extended their 'patriotism' to a photo of three kids carrying giant poppies. - for soldiers of the past, soldiers of the present and soldiers of the future. So now it is going to be never-ending poppies alongside never-ending wars. I gave a talk on 'Left Field' at my old school, Canford, last week. The 200 sixth formers sitting in front of me was a sea of poppies. I didn't want to be rude as they were a lovely audience and the school was more than friendly to this old rebel. But I had to say something. I told them my father had been one of the first Allied doctors to enter Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and I had witnessed war at first-hand. Both experiences meant I think poppies should stay in the fields. Read this about veteran Harry Smith - a true patriot.
I
met yesterday with Prof Nigel Osborne as he passed through London on
his way from running children's workshops in Syria and Lebanon to
Buxton. He was due to give a talk at the Buxton Opera House and
attend the premier of a new work of his, 'Bosnian Voices', to be
performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. The Chief Executive at
Buxton is
Simon Glinn, who played a significant role at the Pavarotti Music
Centre in Mostar. 'Significant'
is not strong enough. His technical skills were vital to the setting
up of the centre. Here is an excerpt from 'Left Field' about Nigel's first visit to Mostar. “War
Child today still emphasises the charity's historical connections
with the music world, but the first money-raiser for our work
involved animals. Over the 1993 August Bank Holiday we organised a
three-day event at London Zoo. There were sitar and sarangi players
near the elephants, Peruvian pipers serenaded the llamas and
didgeridoo players the kangaroos. There were African drummers and
giraffes, gamalan players entertaining the Indonesia rhinoceros,
Brazilian berimbau players the squirrel monkeys. The Chinese
percussionists were kept well away from the giant panda, Ming Ming,
because she needed all her concentration to breed. The most amazing
sites for me were a string quartet playing Bach in the Butterfly
Grotto and a lone cellist in the shadowy depths of the Aquarium
entertaining the circling sharks. On the lawns, pathways and
courtyards there were clowns, jugglers, stilt-walkers, magicians,
dancers and acrobats, story-tellers, poets and pavement artists.
Inside the monkey house we held children's workshops, art and photo
exhibitions. The promotional brochure said that, 'during these three
days, London Zoo, with the help of its animals, will come to the
rescue of another endangered species – children threatened by the
thirty wars raging across our planet.' Six months later Nigel
Osborne arrived in Mostar to
help the children. He was carrying
a large bag full of percussion instruments. A big, bearded bear of a
man, Nigel was Professor of Music at Edinburgh University. He’d
heard that we were co-operating with MTV and taking music tapes into
Sarajevo where he’d been trying
to organise music workshops with young people, working with the
Sarajevo String Quartet and collaborating with cellist, Vedran
Smailović and
poet, Goran
Simić on two children's operas. He
said he would like to run children's workshops in Mostar and
it was to be the start of a long association between Nigel and War
Child. It
was no problem gathering interest. I had been amazed how quickly news
travelled across this bombed-out ghetto and, in such a desperate
place, anything out of the ordinary was news. After two years of
shelling, the upper floors of the UNHCR building had been blown away.
The lower floors, housing the UN office, were as secure as it got in
East Mostar. By the time Nigel arrived, there were twenty children
and their parents. They sat very quietly and few of the children
smiled. They looked as though they were about to be told bad news,
not be offered the chance to bang drums and blow whistles. I looked
around the room and realised most of them would have had no memory of
anything but fear. One mother sat with her blind, impassive,
six-year-old daughter. I watched while Nigel tried to get the girl to
play a triangle. She refused to hold it. This went on for some time
until, finally, she grabbed the triangle with one hand, the metal
stick with the other and struck it over and over. Her face lit up.
Her mother told us that it was the first time she had seen her
daughter smile in over two years. Nigel's arrival in Mostar was to result in a schools' music pogramme that reached 3,000 children in Mostar and the surrounding area. More on all this in Left Field
Kevin
Allen's 'Under Milk Wood' opens in UK cinemas later this week. -
starring Charlotte Church as Polly Garter and Rhys Ifans as Captain
Cat.
I
am looking
forward to seeing it. After 'Left Field' is published I am going to re-write my
Dylan Thomas comedy - 'Spitting at the Sky' - first performed as a professional reading
at the Dylan
Thomas
Festival in Swansea in 2004. I
was a friend of the
art critic,
Mervyn Levy, who went to school with Dylan. He told me that the two
of them shared a flat in Chelsea in the 30s and loved going to Marx
Brothers
films. They acted out the parts when they got home. He also told me
that Thomas had been interred in Macy's morgue in NYC. Knowing this I
set the play in Macy's and introduced Dylan to the Marx Brothers
there.
The
cast in
Swansea
included Sion Probert, Stan Stennett, Liz Morgan and
my friend, Anna Gilbert.
John Yorke, then
Head
of Drama at
Channel 4,
commented:
“a
powerful and beautifully written piece of theatre, and I have to say
that your mastery of language isn't far off Thomas' himself.”
Jeremy Corbyn is 'standing up the
Queen', 'won't kiss her hand', 'refuses to kneel', 'didn't sing her
song'. All archaic bollocks. The language itself is feudal. 'Privy'
council is taken from the time when the monarch held meetings while
he/she was having a shit. 'Cabinet meetings' were also held in the
toilet. Maybe they still are. That long table may have been
photoshopped. As co-founder of War Child
I was once invited to have tea with the Queen. I wouldn't go and, as
I was the lone republican in the charity, someone took my place. They
returned to the office shocked and had moved slightly closer to my
republicanism because, at that time, War Child was running a bakery in
war-torn Bosnia. When told about this Phillip commented, 'I bet they
steal the bread'. Then when the head of our medical projects said we
also supplied insulin to diabetic children, he jumped in with, 'I bet
they steal that too'. According to The Republic the annual cost of
the Monarchy is £334 million. The feast that feeds off the people. 'Left Field', which covers my War Child years, has no references to the
Queen. I promise.
Russell
Mills has created a great cover for Left Field. I am honoured that he has produced such an outstanding design, as effective as those I've admired on his covers for Don DeLillo and Milan Kundera.
Left Field is to be published by
Unbound in March 2016. Funding has exceeded 100%, but
there is still time to pre-order a copy & have your name
acknowledged. To be a book angel, click here.
Sample chapter here
www.davidwilson.org.uk
I
have just finished reading Mandla Langa's The Texture of Shadows which, in his own words, "speaks of the invincibility of the human
spirit. The possibility for people to go for broke and do things even
if there is no reward." Amen to that! A great read. A powerful and
unromantic account of the liberation struggle in South Africa. It is beautifully written—Mandla is both writer and poet. Check
out the interview with him here and then get hold of the book. I have finished Textures on the day when Russell Mills has started work on designing
the cover for Left Field. Mandla kindly offered a comment on me
which will appear in Russell's work. I quoted from Mandla's book in my chapter, 'Rainbows' which is about my meeting Nelson Mandela: "Towering
above his escorts, he was the freest man on earth, freer, certainly,
than his captors who’d have to wrestle with their souls as cat’s
paws of unjust power." Eugene Skeef introduced my own work to Mandla. Eugene is not on my book's cover, but he gets a whole chapter to himself!
Mandla Langa was winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Prize with his novel, The
Lost Colours of the Chameleon
With
the1962 Cuban missile crisis, nuclear war seemed imminent. If the
missile-carrying Soviet vessels
didn’t turn back from Cuba, there would be war. Jackie Kennedy
recalled that she insisted on sleeping with her husband—not
something she often did. She didn’t want to die alone. If she was
scared, the rest of us had every right to be. That
year the anti-nuclear
movement remained the focus of my politics. I read Robert Jungk’s
Brighter Than a Thousand Suns,
the horrific telling
of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with its account of the
shadows of the dead imprinted on the earth. It left me in shock. The
book’s title is taken from Robert Oppenheimer’s words when
witnessing the first atomic bomb explosion in July 1945. He quoted
the Bhagavad Gita,
‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I started to
self-educate myself with all that was not taught at school,
following Bertrand Russell’s axiom that ‘Men are born ignorant
not stupid. They are made stupid by education.’ I read everything:
from Marx's Capital
to Bertrand Russell’s
A History of Western Philosophy
to John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath. I
joined CND and started marching against the bomb. Fifty three years
later and Dr Strangelove is still scaring the shit out of me! Read
more here in 'Left Field'.
