Not Five but only Four Postcards by Adèle Geras

Once upon a time, I used to collect period postcards. I have lots of them, in assorted files and boxes in my house. I picked them up at book fairs, and in second hand shops where there were often cardboard boxes full of them. It was fun to look through them and considering them now, I see that my taste ran to Victorian and Edwardian family groups, devoted engaged couples and fat babies sporting waterfalls of lace. 

Then, one day, I came across what was obviously a set. I bought all five of them. They struck a real chord with me. Since that time, which must have been in the late 80s, I've thought a lot about why these particular images meant so much to me.  I was, and still am, very interested jn photography and had written a short story called The Poppycrunch Kid about the supernatural power of the camera. [This appears in a book called Letters of Fire, long out of print.] I wrote a poem about the  men I imagined taking these haunting photographs.

Then, the IRA  bombed the centre of Manchester in June, 1996  and suddenly, the subject of ruins was once more in my mind.

That day, the day that  Manchester was bombed, I was in town. I wanted to buy a wedding present and went to Piccadilly on the bus. I found the square unusually full. When I made my way towards Debenham's I was stopped by a policeman.

"You can't cross this line,  Miss. There's been a bomb threat," he said. And as he finished speaking, the bomb went off. It was very loud and very frightening and hideously close to where we were. 

The aftermath was amazing. Crowds of silent people lined up in a very orderly manner to board any bus they could...the buses were all pressed into service to evacuate us  from the scene. There were also queues around phone boxes. Remember those?  In 1996 hardly anyone  had a mobile. I certainly didn't.  I went straight home on one of the buses. Four miles away, my husband had heard the explosion.

A few days later, we  went for a walk together through the city. Seeing all the shops, all the pubs, all the places we were used to seeing whole suddenly and shockingly broken, shattered and empty was traumatic, horrible. I can remember standing outside a pub which had a defiant notice chalked on a board outside. You can't kill  Manchester, you bastards! it said, and I was reduced to tears. No one was killed that day. Only the fabric of Manchester: the stones, the glass, the wood lay in pieces and I felt heartbroken.

I remembered these postcards. Here they are. I've copied the English words printed on each card. They are also there in French. Under the title it says: La Guerre, 1914-17 LCHParis  

Reninghe Belgium (the church bombarded by the Germans)

Pervyse (Belgium) The ruins of the church

La Panne (Belgium) Effect of a 75 on a spys (sic) house

Nieucappelle (Belgium) View of a brewery after the bombardment

There was a fifth postcard. The best of them all and I cannot find it. It may be in another file and it may surface  again one day.  It is of the same soldier who appears in the Nieucapelle Brewery photo but it's a different pose. The only description I have of it is in the poem I wrote shortly after buying all five. It gives, I hope, a good description of what was shown.  I'm sorry I have only words to convey its power.   The poem follows: 

Five Postcards: La Guerre 1914-17 LCH Paris

L.C.H Paris photographed the War,
sent men to tiptoe over stones cracked open
(but oh, the mud on patent leather shoes
accustomed to sliding
round and round the ladies! The hands
that draped silk gowns alongside cardboard urns
and tucked undying flowers into décolletages
will touch raw air outside the studio.)

Pervyse, Nieucapelle, Reninghe, La Panne,
les ruines, les ruines après le bombardement.

With difficulty on uneven ground
they found flat places,
covered their heads with black,
looked for something representative.

Here, a numbered bomb
blew the spy's house
to dust under a dune of bricks.
Only one corner, the last window
as they were.

Then, two grey church views:
free-standing arches rise in fields
of carvings scattered into shards.
Towers show white skies
through torn lace of masonry,
windows with no glass.

The brewery roof has gone, leaving
a lattice of timbers.
There's a soldier in this picture,
embarrassed by his own survival.
Behind the camera, under the dark cloth
he imagines the head, a skull's curve.
He's propped his bayonet 
against the sandbagged wall
and made his own, much smaller conflagration:
lighting a cigarette,
breathing out the smoke. 

SNAGGLE-TOOTHED BEAUTY by H.M. Castor

Last week I returned, not to the county of my birth, but to the county of my growing-up: Warwickshire. In terms of castles and stately homes, the county has an embarrassment of riches, including Warwick Castle, Charlecote Park, Ragley Hall, Baddesley Clinton, Coughton Court, Upton House and Kenilworth Castle. This last is a ruin; having been a fortress palace of great importance for many centuries, used by monarchs from Henry II to Henry VII, and famous as the place where Robert Dudley played host to Elizabeth I for an exceptionally long visit (19 days) in 1575, it was then ‘slighted’ by the Parliamentarians during the Civil War – and descended gradually, thereafter, into a fully ruined state.

(‘Slighted’, incidentally, seems to me a rather marvellous term - it retains a whiff of the drawing-room faux pas while in fact meaning here the partial destruction of a building so as to make it useless as a stronghold. Poor Kenilworth Castle had its battlements, parts of its outer bailey and one wall of its great tower destroyed.)

I have visited Kenilworth many times over the years, and have always felt keenly what a shame it is that that castle is a ruin. I have spent my visits reconstructing it in my mind, putting in floors where none now exist…

…and viewing the bits of detailed decoration that do remain as grief-inducing indications of just how much we have lost:

Which, of course, they are. However, on last week’s visit, I decided to adopt a different attitude. I decided simply to look. Not at what Kenilworth would have been, or ought to be, but at what it is. At art exhibitions, I am a great one for conscientiously reading all the labels and somehow not giving myself enough time or mental relaxation to look properly at the pictures. So to look – for once – at the castle, as far as possible without interpretation, was my task.

Thus, this blog is something of a photo journal. And a photo journal without labels. I didn’t want to concern myself with which bit was built by John of Gaunt and which by Robert Dudley. (Though if you are interested in finding out more, there is a very full article on the castle here.)

I noticed, instead, the shapes made on the surface of the stone by centuries of exposure to the elements:

…and how the depredations of the weather have turned a set of worn steps into a water-smoothed cascade:

I looked at the rhythm of shapes:

I thought how, in some places, it was as if a hungry monster had simply bitten bits off the building:

And I marvelled at what a ruin gives you: a view of the secret textures of the building’s fabric – it’s like a cake or a loaf that’s been torn open, so that you can see beneath its crust:

Finally, of course, I looked at the unavoidable graffiti. In doing so I was reminded of Eleanor Updale’s comments in her recent blog here about the different values we place upon things depending on their age. For, while the recent graffiti gave me an outraged shudder, some of the older examples had me peering in fascination:

…and had they been still older they would have positively entranced me (show me 16^th century graffiti & I swoon!). Even so – and it must be the bibliophile in me – I admit I do always tend for fall for a nice font:

H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII - is published by Templar in the UK (where it is newly available in paperback - whoop!), and by Penguin in Australia.

H.M. Castor's website is here.