CARDIFF BLITZ ANNIVERSARY- Responsive Writing in Progress.
Father and mother of this unborn boy, still sweethearts, kiss goodbye on a street corner in Bute Town….as they part and the man walks around the corner. A bomb drops before him through the pavement. He is blown off his feet.
Its imagined in black and white… thats how long it was ago.
1957 unborn baby boy becomes the 6th child.
Night after night of false Alarms- like hanging out the washing in the rain.
Cardiff the flight path to other destinations- detonations.
Full Moon.
A Bombers Moon.
One small step for man…
Air Raids.
Sirens.
Beams of light stage the night sky. An audition? A dress rehearsal?
Out on the town
Olympia Cinema Evacuation.
Descending from the mountain of the Gods.
Cigarettes, songs and lipstick. Small bright pleasures….
Black out.
Lights up.
Now the signs say:
THANK YOU
LOCAL HEROES.
Split second decision which crevice in which to stowaway. Under the stairs? A neighbour’s bunker? Anderson shelter? Under the Kitchen Table? Knitted onesie siren suits for the children…just like Winston Churchill.
As he said, “We are all worms, But I do believe that I am a glow worm.”
“We are all in this together” say the powers that be.
The folk of Riverside, Grange-town and Bute-town could not take refuge in country houses or expensive basement clubs- they faced the deadly raids as bejewelled skies embedded within chores night and day. Children armed with a little dog-eared book “Aircraft Recognition”. Standing wide-eyed, glued to the spot identifying planes even as silhouettes, watching the German fighter planes machine-gunning the barrage -balloons above them in the sky.
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
George Orwell Animal Farm
It was ‘Ordinary’' people who lived and died through the Blitz.
The M.O.D in the fashion of King Herod sent out a wise, innocent and clever young prince Solly Zukerman to investigate the physiological effects of the Blitz . Prince Solly knocked on doors, interviewed survivors and wove his benevolent inquisition into the children’s homework. Mining diamonds in the rough.
When Prince Solly Returned to Palace M.O.D they asked in hushed tones,
“What does it take to break their spirits-their morale?”
Why did they want to know? The young scientific prince presumed that the M.O.D had good intentions.
The children distinguish the lower tones of German Planes from the high-octane rapid Spitfires….
At school they are instructed…Never Run away from the Planes. Let the bullets fly over your heads as you run into the guns. Alternately diving into a ditch and covering the vulnerable point at the back of your necks with your hands.
The Sirens sound at school one ration of emergency chocolate impossible to resist. Huddled together on concrete benches.
STAY SAFE.
Be in your Bubbles. Wash your hands.
Soap Suds . Lather. Rations.
Desirable Gas Masks dimorphic Mickey Mouses induce Sibling Rivalries.
Disney aspirations dismayed for parade to school.
Stories trickle out years later clear as Christmas lights- elders eyes turn bright once again. Shinning out through faded threadbare memories… like the Star of David somehow flashes a smile as clear as day.
‘From the mouths of children and infants You have ordained praise on account of Your adversaries, to silence the enemy and avenger.”
“You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.”
Flash backs of the Home-Front interwoven by women everyday domesticities and children’s play.
Fathers tended not to speak of it ever after. Washed Laundered ironed and starched by their wives. The youngest ones too young to know or those not born could only feel what had been shut down forever. It was often heard,
“He was never the same again.” There was visible damage and there was invisible damage.
Fathers returning to a home made rubble, exhuming their families, sometimes whole, sometimes in pieces, some living and some dead. Some died without a mark. Some bodies never recovered.
Well, some of us live.
And I never know why, whenever we get to tactics,
Men either laugh or cry, though neither is strictly called for.
Reed, Henry. "Movement of Bodies.” LESSONS OF THE WAR. III.
KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.
Under aloofness our souls bend rending
The sorrow out of the bereaved father’s breast
Tearing it out and holding it in our own hands
Adopting it to our own bodies
Caring for the children we had never seen.
Timothy Corsellis.
Pilot turned conscientious objector upon discovering it was his duty to bomb civilians
Children at play, deft brightly, patch-worked with life embroidered into everyday battle drop-backs; aftermaths…
Bright eyes and little fingers imploring the rubble to spit out incendiary souvenirs. Often the houses bit off more than they could chew. A kingdom of bombed buildings lie as avalanches of broken teeth. The children salvage munitions, trophies and treasures… once the survivors, the lifeless, the maimed, those christened nameless in death and their identifiable limbs. Sometimes its not pretty. Empathy an after-thought, an unpredictable blossoming.
The Anderson Shelter decked out like a Wendy house…her 20 stone Granny cosies their hunkering down to Nest to melt away the freeze.
Children are Free to play out. ‘Be back for tea.’
Silver Barrage Balloons like half sketched, fully inflated cartoons decorate Cardiff’s mysteriously disorientating, foiling the enemy bombers deflecting them to a higher, darker and remoter realm with a less accurate eye.
Now wearing my rosy tinted spectacles Tiger Bay is a radiant utopia with sharp white teeth. A little city into the world with invisible and mysterious magical walls and laws. In my childhood it held a ‘no go’ romantic magnetism. A kingdom of outsiderness where wayfarers and wanderers could feel a sense of belonging. Inside me there was a little flame of longing to be welcome there.
Nearly a life time later the unborn boy from a kiss on the corner tells:
The Boundaries between Grange town, the Bay were permeable. a continuum from Bute Town opened out onto the whole world over the oceans. In Bute Town always I was home. Human tributaries flow through friends and families across boundaries.
Histories fade but their is folk memory.
The News is scantily clad with undergarments of information and well weighted Sunday Best vestments of Morale and Spirit. Those bereaved scour the family announcements weeks later for signs. Shattered kin and communities. Numbers are smudged and smothered. No sign must show of being broken.
names transform into numbers
lives become statistics.
bodies become economies.
sandbags.
trust …
the science.
deaths feed the figures intravenously fed through the media as a poison panacea of fear.
still empathy is an after thought- now full grown appropriately behaved. meanwhile… under lock and key some profit…
safe as houses .
Yet we remain divided within ourselves as well as between each other. How to navigate this time through nurture?… and navigate through integrating CARE within our daily lives…which respect and meet different individual needs? Is there a kind of spirit we can resurrect from the Blitz and affirmation of living which includes dying? How to orientate with our compass to truth within a maze of branded media and paranoid conspiracy theories propagating fear, policing, compliancy and control. Remembering their is a distinction between Science as a continuum, practice of enquiry and investigation as distinct from Technology. Science is not a Messiah, science can only collaborate within our survival as a way of resurrecting questions completely and without compromise.
The memory skins of the survivors are scarred by those disappeared from their lives.
A lattice work of guilts, destinies, What ifs. An errand to the shop for cough mixture. A birthday party. A kitchen hideout or under the stairs?- architectural gambols. A momentary distraction. Split minute decisions. Trap Doors in destiny. A welcome in. All these diversions creating small skirmishes in time, little displacements, twists of fate both cruel and kind. Fault lines which open and indelibly separate the living from the dead.
Hollyman the Baker stands on the corner of Corporation Road, like the Pied Piper calling the children into take refuge in the shelter beneath his bakery. It must have smelt delicious. The precarity of every kindness becomes a gamble, a safety net becomes a refuge in death. The delivery boy and the horse did not conspire to survive. Labyrinths of ordinary everyday events concur and flutter to collaborate by chance in death or survival.
The unborn little boy whose mother and father had kissed on the corner was number 6 child. Born in 1957. Now 9 years old. To him the War had seemed more than a hundred years ago. Ancient History. Slipping beneath the fence into bombed houses, Anderson Shelters. Empty Shells, fragments of bombs, the broken arm or leg of a buried chair used as a machine gun. Relics. A ship wreck. War Games. And yet oblivious to the real War. In retrospect he sees it had barely past.
I asked, “Did you want to be a soldier?”
No I prefer a plastic war that can be put away in boxes. Stylistically yes but I preferred the American and German uniforms were far sexier. I am a staunch Pacifist. Perhaps I am a coward. Perhaps a rebel. Perhaps I lack discipline. It was enough of a verification that I had my fathers disapproval to become a Rastafarian.
My father was in the RAF in Egypt and mentioned meeting Haile Selassie…that was all he said about the War.
There are the spaces between the words which people say.
These gaps make the songs and where so many thoughts feelings, loves, regrets, griefs, absences reside.
Everything we do not know and will never know is a presence like the night sky.
What I never saw
Were the weary hours of waiting while the
sun rose and set,
The everlasting eye turned upwards to the sky,
Watching the weather which said,
Thou shalt not fly'.
We sat together as we sat at peace
Bound by no ideal of service
But by a common interest in pornography and
a desire to outdrink one another
War was remote;
Now the unborn son says
“True History Fades.”
***
An RAF bomber during the War conscripted early by falsifying his papers.
He was a character, not a poet. A practical man. A life, a body, a mind rendered to engineering.
Flying high a bomber by 17years old. Doing his duty. He believed doing his jobs well, all his faith wired into the engineering of machine …to see him through. To him Survival was the rules of operating the machine. A belief in his abilities to handle and control the machinery. He was also wired with stories.
He told of the final days of War. His final flight to Dresden.
What he witnessed was the German pilots letting them pass with a sad slow wave of surrender. Something he would feel and somehow understand as a Pilot. A ray of recognition of the enemy’s humanity, emotion, motivation…a kind of empathy.
In reality the hovering Messerschmitt understood it was no longer possible to defend their cities.
Dresden is decimated.
Did he know he was bombing civilians women and children?
He prided himself on doing his job well. He hit the targets as he was told. He was committed to do what was necessary. He did not hold the blueprint of the war. He embodied the blueprint of his aero plane.
It seemed he had nerves of steel.
Yet he knew fear… something he was not ashamed of. He knew death.
He knew precision. He knew the machine.
He didn't speak of another faith.
After his 30th mission he carried on.
31st mission he was the most frightened he had ever been.
He survived and exorcised an aura superstition which surrounds a heroes right of passage.
Doing his job well was more important and fitting to him than being a hero.
After the War he became a Engineer.
Cinema was the temple of World War 2.
All his life he worked with knowledge, dedication, efficiency and speed. he was working with adaptive excellence till the day he died well into his nineties, with the principle of solving a problem.
“The Aims of Life are the best defence against death.”
Primo Levi
“ In our Age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues and politics itself, is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”
George Orwell
Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs that properly concern them.
Paul Valery
We are living (includes dying) through an era of segregated, marginalised and obscured precarity. Privilege and Progress through civilisation in what ever form are seen as humanity’s salvation. Such so much needs to be obliterated to fit into the image…for the image and the information is the world in which we occupy. Perhaps the Blitz is a message to those living those lives which are somehow ideologically expendable…those who are compelled to subsist by choice or necessity in the realm of bodily survival and imagination. Cleaners, Carers, Those at the front line receive no care and minimal compensation in their lives. Do all battles become about property, power?
What can we excavate reanimate within our lives as a resource of endurance, resilience and spirit of adaptive renounce and empathy.
ARTISTS BLITZ PILGRIMAGE.
KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.
How can SURVIVAL Include LIVING in STAYING ALIVE?
The artists gather to trace a pilgrimage through Grangetown’s Blitz hotspots a glow yet frozen beneath the surface.
Their transient nomadic passage through the streets summons a flutter of synchronistic encounters with residents and passers by.
Hollyman’s Bakery now in the current guise of a Hardware Store, somehow sheaths of wheat sprouting accidentally nearest patch of land echoes it ’s former life and perhaps rebirth. Some stories leak out of the shop and the flat above to the pilgrims ears flaming on the pavement. A brick falling out of the wall, the smell of burnt toast at 5am. Somehow the bakery and the bombing resonates a need to be witnessed. It is heard the place is still shrouded by a undeserved slant and hue, a trick of light cast by brand of history that wraps events in victories. An aura of shame/guilt still emanating from that night…an unwanted possession that cannot be cast off. A silent response frames the hushed magical chatter.
Chance meeting An older lady pursued on bicycle identified as a potential witness and survivor of the Blitz. Still living in the same street, her Brother swopped comics with boy opposite…he died with his family on the night of the Blitz. Her husband was waiting…
How can these little traces details bear witness to the way we live now?
What don’t we see?
What do see ?
Light was the enemy…safe in the darkness.
Safety was never absolute. Never a sealed deal.
Light and darkness tightly bound together.
These little cascade victories of daily survival through the BLITZ are obscured and smothered by the hero-victim, conquest-defeat, enemy-ally iconographies and narratives of establishment history.. The truths are so much more complex, entangled, flickering and interdependent in their starkness and subtlety. What we so rarely realise is that every ordinary person was fighting the war some in some way shape and form both externally, internally. So much of the bigger picture lay beyond their experience and somehow the authentic truth is to be excavated and is still living somehow in the fragments, the fall out and shinning pieces within the kaleidoscope of War.
“There is a time to live, a time to die and a time to laugh, at no time are the 3 of them very far apart.”
Spike Milligan
***