'Judith Kerr at 92' by Lydia Syson ('We haven't always been old ladies...)

Every so often I go into a small grump about the way authors these days are forced into the role of performers.  Instead of being left to write or draw in peace, they have to climb onto stages and make witty conversation.  Their audiences sometimes seem keener to pay for tickets for such shows than buy the speakers’ books.  And then I go and sit at the feet of a literary heroine (or hero) and go wobbly with admiration and perhaps a little bit tearful and I think instead how wonderful it is that those of us who worship certain living writers now have so many opportunities to breathe in their auras, get a better sense of how they tick, and generally show our love and appreciation for their work.  It doesn’t matter one bit if you've read almost everything they’ve said elsewhere already (and possibly forgotten it).  There’s something indefinably remarkable about having heard that person say it again, out loud, in your very presence.  And there’s always something new too - a new book, a new thought, a new image - to treasure and mull over until the next opportunity arises.

Nicolette Jones and Judith Kerr at Jewish Book Week 2016
@photographer Enda Bowe

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit was probably the first book anyone ever pressed into my hands and told me that I had absolutely got to read.  (The friend who did that, when I was about ten, was half-German, and she was absolutely right.) It was also the first book I ever read about growing up in Hitler's Germany. Last month I had the enormous pleasure of listening to Judith Kerr talking to Nicolette Jones at Jewish Book Week.  

Judith Kerr told lots of the lovely stories which you can read in her illustrated autobiography Creatures, which came out a couple of years ago when she turned 90: about the weird cat who stalked green beans, and the other weird cat who liked boiled eggs, and the two different fathers’ faces in The Tiger Who Came to Tea.  

@photographer Enda Bowe

She sat in her neat tartan skirt, looking like a perfect white-haired old lady, who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, not even one she had noticed communing with his own reflection, spotted on a shiny car.  She talked modestly and honestly about her working life, her marriage and her children, always observant but slightly giving the impression that everything had somehow just happened.  But of course the firm resolve and gentle sense of rebellion so fundamental to her character and so clear in all her books kept surfacing.  The first German publisher of the Mog books had annoyed her by insisting in an ‘anti-feminist’ way that the cat was a male.  ‘How could a creature so enterprising possibly be female?’ they argued, and changed the cat's sex.  So Judith Kerr gave Mog kittens. 

There was sadness as well as humour.  When she became a widow herself, she began to notice widows everywhere, and started to draw old ladies getting up to things.  (My Henry, The Great Granny Gang. ‘We haven’t always been old ladies,’ she observed.  She also spoke of reading recently a new biography of her father, Alfred Kerr. 

Alfred Kerr, portrait by Lovis Corinth, 1907

When he left Germany in 1933 just before his passport was taken away, he was so famous an essayist and theatre critic that he was known as the Culture Pope, and his books were burned.  Yet Alfred Kerr ended up in England a nobody, without a language in which he could write. Judith and her brother Michael had quickly learned to love being young refugees, living in Switzerland and France, learning new languages, seeing the world; she conveys the adventure of it all beautifully in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.  But it is was only a few months ago that she realised quite how well her parents had managed to conceal the truth of their situation and their own emotions from the children, and how very desperate they had become.  At one point her mother had not just wanted to commit suicide herself, but to kill the children too.  Even without this knowledge, reading The Other Way Round in adulthood is a peculiarly painful experience because of the delicate way Kerr portrays the shifting relationship between parents and children when the family comes to England.  The book is now called Bombs on Aunt Dainty but I think the original title got to the nub of the book, and I wish it hadn't been changed.  

@photographer Enda Bowe

The week after this event at Jewish Book Week, the French government began to bulldoze a section of the Jungle Camp in Calais, where hundreds of unaccompanied and unprotected children have been surviving. Citizens UK believes 150 of these children have a right to be reunited with family in the UK, but the processes are not set up to help them, and they are stuck.  Judith Kerr talked movingly of the warmth of the welcome and the value of the help she and her brother received as young refugees, and has written that she became a ‘Brit’ in the summer of 1940.  Now she is a national treasure.

www.lydiasyson.com

'Don't Hang the Messenger' by Karen Maitland

'I don't care what your delivery sheet says,
 I'm not signing for the white elephant!'

Having waited all day for a ‘guaranteed’ delivery of a package which has not arrived, I find myself wondering if things were any better before our modern courier services.

Since the time of the ancient civilizations there has always been a need for couriers and messengers to deliver valuable packages and vital documents. Both the Persians and Romans established very efficient networks of state messengers, but by the 11th Century in Europe many commoners such as wealthy merchants, town councils and monasteries discovered they needed to develop their own independent courier systems, not least because they wanted to keep their business interests safely away from the prying eyes of government officials, popes and kings. Even universities in the Middle Ages employed their own couriers so that students could obtain money urgently from their families to pay their fees or refill their wine flagons, and these university couriers were given royal dispensation to travel without hindrance.

But maintaining a courier system was an expensive business, not only did the messengers have to be provided with coins for food and lodgings on the road, but they needed money to change horses, pay tolls, buy passage on ships or river craft, and they often had to be provided with the funds to bribe clerks and officials so that they could be admitted straightaway to see someone of importance and not kept hanging around for weeks. So it made sense for individuals to band together to finance a courier service between them. One of the first of these was the Scarsella dei Mercanti Fiorentini founded in Florence in 1357 by a group of merchants, who hit on the bright idea of not only using the service themselves, but allowing anyone who could afford it to pay to use it too, whenever the need arose.

Couriers had to be fit, tough, trustworthy and resourceful. It helped if you could speak several languages as well. On one occasion when a quantity of gold had to be sent secretly from Verona to St Gall, six messengers were dispatched in pairs travelling by different routes disguised as pilgrims. They were warned that if they were caught, the gold would be bound to their legs with their own thigh sinews!

This was probably not an idle threat, since at the siege of Auberoche in 1345, when the French captured a page boy on his way to deliver a message to the English inside the besieged castle, the poor lad was bound and catapulted into the castle from a trebuchet or siege engine, with the letters he was carrying tied around his neck. Unsurprisingly it is said the knights were much ‘astonished and discomforted when they saw him arrive.’

Before the days of modern ID cards, couriers who were carrying valuables or secret messages had to find a way to prove their own identity and that of the person to whom they were delivering the package. The simplest method was to a cut a coin in half, one being given to the recipient who would then match it to the courier’s. Rings were often use to identify the bearer or recipient, as well as passwords and coded gestures. Confidential documents could be concealed in the linings of clothes or laid flat on a wooden board and coated with a thick layer of wax, so that it would appear to be a cheap writing tablet. Not something a thief would bother stealing.

If messages fell into the wrong hands, the consequences could be disastrous. When Calais was being besieged by Edward III in 1346, the French defenders tried to send a letter to their king telling him they were so desperate they would have to start eating each other or surrender if help didn’t arrive. When one of couriers realised he had been spotted, he tied the letter he was carrying to an axe and threw it into the sea, hoping the axe would weigh it down, but it floated ashore and fell into the hands of Edward III who took great delight in personally sending it to the French king, just to add to his enemy’s humiliation.

Quite apart from the hazards of the journey itself, some couriers must have felt very apprehensive

Valette - Grand Master of the Knights of St. John

about the reception they’d receive when they eventually arrived. The accepted laws of chivalry meant that a messenger delivering bad news should be allowed to speak freely without being punished, but men in authority were seldom noted for their sweet disposition and often the temptation to ‘hang the messenger’ proved too great. 

 In 1565, when a courier delivered the message to Suleiman that his siege of Malta had failed, Suleiman flew into a rage and stamped on the unfortunate man. But to be fair, when the Turks had earlier sent a messenger to Valette, Grand Master of the Knights of St. John on Malta, he had ordered the messenger hanged, and only relented when it was pointed out that the poor man was a slave who couldn’t disobey orders. So instead Valette sent him back with the message that he would hang anyone who came to deliver any further communications.

As for that package – I’m still waiting!

The News Where You Are Catherine Johnson

I think a book came out with that title recently I think by Catherine Flynn, but that's not what this blog is about. It is, like a lot of books, about identity and local TV news and is more than a little muddled.

Deedee Cuddihy's Glaswegian Yes Egg

This goes out on the 14th, a few days before the momentous Scottish referendum. There as been so much said about this and I am in no way Scots, although there is a good chance that one of the plantation owners in the hills of Jamaica who gave his name (and no doubt his genes) to my family was.  And I have no say in the vote and when all is said and done if I did, I  certainly see the optimism and hope that comes with the power to vote in a high taxing, high spending socialist/green government along Icelandic lines.

There have been a lot of posts from English people who want the status quo, who feel Scotland shouldn't go, there's talk of family break ups... This does not resonate with me at all. I don't think Scots will be foreign, they'll still be British, there are not building a wall or using the Trident missiles to disengage Scotland from England and sail their new country down to the more salubrious Med.

So while it has been fascinating to see the excitement of the debate, I still feel that it is fundamentally nothing to do with me. What has got to do with me is being English. I have never - I don't think - typed I am English anywhere ever before. I don't go around saying 'I am English'. I think at the age of 52 I probably ought to start. I have always been happy with British, but English? It's not got the excitement of the Celtic fringe, we're not the downtrodden we're the ones (usually) doing the treading.

My previous get out was that I was a Londoner, and if I still lived there would see all kinds of advantages in (so long as we lost Boris) cutting loose from the rest of the UKIP addled country, slashing house prices and letting out the Shard and every other half empty ball swinging 'look at me' tower block as utterly affordable housing.

 One of the worries that have been raised about Scottish nationhood is the possible rise in English Nationalism. English Nationalism for any of our overseas readers, unlike the Celtic sort has always been problematic. This is to do with history of course. In the UK family England has always been the bossy one, the one who ate all the pies and told the others what and how to do.

Jim Murphy talks to Nos. From the BBC

Scots Nats have had in the past, a reputation for anti Englishness, Welsh Nats too. Those pesky Welsh - they are just like the French and the Spanish - they will insist on speaking their own language in pubs and shops even when English people walk in....

English nationalism is probably best  illustrated by the hearty lads and lasses of UKIP or  the EDL or the now almost defunct BNP. These parties stated aims include an end to immigration and an end to 'Politically Correct Culture'.

I believe the difference in the two forms of nationalism is that the Scots and the Welsh sort are not - these days anyway - driven by fear in a way that English Nationalism seems to be. I am well aware I may be wrong, this is just my viewpoint.

I was always terrified of moving away from London. London is  a bubble of comparative safety and normalcy for the brown skinned. In the past year and a half out of London enjoying fresh air and sea views, I have only experienced friendly enquiries about my provenance, in fact the most recent was from a woman who introduced herself as a Tanning Consultant. She informed me that my skin shade was the one her white clients aspired to most.

God I have got completely off the topic. Excuse me.

Right, so I love local news. In Hackney I loved the Gazette, and here in Hastings we have our precious Observer. There's also that bit on the end of the BBC News at Ten - The News Where You Are.
So the first spring I was here the one big  thing I noticed was how often they referenced Calais. Calais with it's desperate hordes, just across the water, all waiting to jump on lorries, cars, trains, little boats, maybe soon, with global warming they will be walking across and taking our jobs. I am being facetious but the fear level was high. The way they have told this story must engender fear.  Fear among these Kent and Sussex residents that they are suddenly going to be swamped.  Fear among those of us whose melanin levels are higher than most.

And then this summer there has been the explosion in anger and desperation among the (mostly) men camped out desperate to find work and help their families back wherever they came from. Can we imagine (perhaps with the help of Gillian Cross's excellent book After Tomorrow) what these people have gone through to get here?

What am I saying here?  You're thinking, does this woman want the floodgates open? She should go back to where she came from if she's going to mouth off? What exactly is her argument?

I suppose it is this. We all want safety, we all want hope, and we all want fairness. Please lets not talk up fear, and please lets emphasise similarities not differences. In whatever country we happen to be in,


Catherine