Back when I was at uni, when now-respectable professors happily got their kit off for photos, which is a story that needn’t bother you now, I did Sociology. Or as Paul McCartney nearly put it, Sociology did me. One of the pitifully few things I remember about any of it was the concept of time being introduced to work with the introduction of factories, whistles, time-sheets and clocking-on. Before that in summer there were long day-works and in the absence of artificial light in winter, short ones.
Tomorrow is going to be a long one, not just because it’s summer, although the weather says otherwise here. More because I’ve got to get s train ticket with a code and codes, in my experience, don’t always work. If that sounds like me just being old, I bought one of the first airline ticketless tickets, back in 2003. It didn’t eork. Nobody knew what to do with the bit of paper with the code on it at Heathrow, the printer there wasn’t working, the last plane I’d tried to catch there someone had tried to blow up and I’d spent £2,500 on Business Class tickets. Chiefly because someone else was paying. The ticket still didn’t work though.
Tomorrow I could go and get my tickets after I’ve gone to the post office and the opticians and just casually stroll up, tap my code receipt in and like a normal person, go to London. But what if it doesn’t work? If I go now and it doesn’t work at least I get a whole evening to panic about it. Because tomorrow is a bit important. I’ve got a job interview tomorrow lunchtime for something I’d like to do. After that, almost unplanned, or certainly not planned when I bought my ticket, I’m pitching Janni Schenck, the screenplay what I wrote, at Raindance. In front of money people. In front of producers. In front of people who could say “we’re going with this. Here’s some money to not sell it to anyone else while we sort out some stuff about it.”
I haven’t thought about what accent they’d use, yet. Might not happen. But it could. If my ticket works, obviously. If I can decide what to wear. And I can find somewhere to park. All kinds of things.
Once upon a time I wrote this thing. This script, Janni Schenck. Then I re-wrote it and each time I learned something else I had to re-write it again. I’ve lost track of how many re-writes I’ve had to do.
Not a game. Not at all.
For years I convinced myself I couldn’t write it. It’s about a German kid in a small rural village in 1945. I’m not German. I only went to Germany once and that was Hamburg, which nice though it is, isn’t any more like a rural village than Heathrow is like Keevil airfield. Exactly. Where I grew up. Where we used to ride mopeds. Where there was a huge WWII resettlement camp for Polish people. More irrelevancies; that was the point. There was always a reason not to write it, because I thought I couldn’t.
Then late last year I got pneumonia. It really wasn’t funny but one good thing came out of it: I wrote Janni Schenck in about ten days. That might explain why it needed so many re-writes, but on the plus side I only remember sitting down to write, with my laptop, on the sofa practically in the dark twice, for about ten minutes. It must have taken longer than that, but I honestly don’t remember.
So the update: when I wrote my first script it won the BBC Writers Room prize, which was going to pitch it to Cascade studios which I duly did and equally duly they didn’t option it, life being unfair. Later on, someone who works on scripts for a living told me ‘it’s not a script.’ She also told me that Cascade’s rejection of it on the basis that there was ‘a gap in the narrative arc,’ (unlike say, the millions of narrative gaps in Love Actually) was standard. As she said, ‘there always is.’
I sent it to Film Suffolk via an actor friend who liked it and sent it on to someone who might be in a position to produce it. He sent it back too, but for reasons I’d predicted. More than somewhat surprisingly he’d written a screenplay about a German kid of the same age, set at the end of WWII in a little German village near where my semi-invented German village was. Or wasn’t. I don’t know where the real Janni Schenck’s village was and I think he’s long dead given I met him nearly a quarter-century ago; I set it in the fictional village in Fall, which is a real place but these days is mostly under a reservoir. It caught my eye not for its name but for the story in the newspaper a while ago, about how the water was drying out. Fall was resurrecting.
They only live in old photos now.
I sent it to an American festival where screenplays they like are performed. They liked it but they didn’t perform it for a number of technical reasons, none of which were what I expected and all of which are fixable. There are three major things to do, one of which I’ve completed and the other two I’m wasting time not doing today, so by six o’clock or it won’t get done.
The reason Film Suffolk’s producer friend didn’t want to get involved was for the reason I’d predicted. Outside Germany it’s going to be hard to place. Germans in films are Bad. Everyone knows that. This is a world America saved, don’t forget. At the cinema, anyway. Band of Brothers had the 101st Airborne showing the Brits how to do it at Arnhem don’t forget, which is a pretty good trick given there were precisely no Americans at Arnhem at all. None. Zilch. Nada. It never happened. Except on TV.
So I need to find a German producer and one who’s worked in the genre, as we say, taking off our hand-crafted Persol shades and looking intent. And I might have found one, after only a very little research, if you can call Google and Wikipedia ‘research.’ But don’t start me on that.
Please step forward Herr Tom Tykwer. While I was teaching kids to shoot in America and driving my Chevrolet to Gene Fleck’s Meadow Inn with a cheerleader called Nancy-Jean (no, I actually, tragically actually did all this stuff), Herr Tykwer, who I am going to be incredibly polite to before I’ve met him, was setting up a film company. And he made a film dealing with a similar theme.
Four Days In May is curious. It’s about a boy in the Hitler Youth, about the same age as Janni in 1945, set in the very last week of the war. The end of Janni’s war came about a fortnight earlier. But other than that, very similar.
The course promises to transform it from good to world class. And so far, I know it’s good. When the only negative comment to date is “I’m not reading this again – it’s too upsetting. Sorry,” then although I hadn’t intended to upset my friend, it wasn’t the worst thing she could have said about it.
There were serious reasons she’d been upset by it, but it’s a serious subject. When you’re thirteen you only know what you’re told. For some people, that goes on for the rest of their lives. The tragedy is that for some of those, that’s quite a short time-scale.
It sounds bucolic. Something that should grace the pages of The Countryman. Accompanied by a picture of daffodils bravely poking their tender heads above the snow, and maybe a quotation from Wordsworth as well, something symbolising hope and renewal.
Except this time of year doesn’t feel like that yet. It would be stupid to say the whole world reeled over the past few weeks when one by one, the musical figures I grew up with simply died; if you’re trying not to get ebola or hoping your house doesn’t get bombed again in Syria then you probably, I concede, have more to worry about than whether there really is a starman waiting in the sky who’d like to come and see us, or whether that weird light and unearthly sound is just an F-14’s afterburner kicking in.
But they still died, one after the other. Bowie, Rickman, Mott the Hoople’s drummer, the guy who played guitar in The Eagles. I’m not going to do the whole “their loss means” blah. I know it doesn’t mean much in the whole scheme of things, but then again, what does? I’m now a better guitarist than the guy in the Eagles and my guitar playing isn’t great. I’m a better drummer than that guy in Mott the Hoople and I don’t play the drums at all. But I could try. And he can’t anymore.
But I’m not extending this line of thought to David Bowie. He was special. I don’t know whether he was special because he was the perfect pop-star, the one guaranteed to get your parents howling with confused rage. It can’t be just that. We had a long queue of pop-stars who could do that, from Alice Cooper to Noddy Holder, Marc Bolan and in my house at least, ELO. They particularly enraged my mother because, listening to just the start of Rockaria, it was clear they knew something about music. But then they just had to spoil it, didn’t they, with that thump thump thump. Ian Hunter’s habit of nicking bits of Debussy and anything else that was out of copyright went down much the same way.
I can’t say anything about David Bowie. I mean I won’t. Because it hurts. I stopped listening to his stuff after Ashes to Ashes. I listened to when it first came out, my first term at Bath eating breakfast in a warm new house in frosty Larkhall before I rode my Triumph up the hill to the university. I came back again with Heathen, then stopped again until what I still call last year, in 2013. Oh because I’m old and senile, alright? Happy now?
The Next Day album (see above – it’s what we call it at my age) quietly stood every other song broadcast on its head, asking Where Are We Now? of a world that had learned to pretend that identikit boy dancers were musicians and synchronised strippers were empowered businesswomen leveraging their assets.
And now Lazarus. And it’s still a lie. David Bowie is not going to rise from the dead. I can’t even bear to listen to this too much, or to be honest, most of his other stuff. Not right now.
This, a film of a man dying written and produced and directed by a man dying, along with a big percentage of our hopes and alternative dreams, our fantasy of jumping up on the stage to sing the songs of darkness and dismay, or at least mine until I did it a couple of times and found another world there and not the one I’d quite expected, this is too much right now.
Heroes had been the anthem for a time in Bristol and Bath, a time of leather jackets and silk scarves and patchouli and cowboy boots on Park Road, hanging around the record stores and bookshops, living our preposterously tamely genteel version of street-life that was unimaginably alien to parents brought up on rationing. Our rebellion was making sure all our girlfriends were on the pill. That’s how wild we were. You think I’m joking.
This was still a time when I went to the doctor one day to discuss the pros and cons of this policy with my family doctor, a man so cool he hand-rolled liquorice papers in the surgery while telling you not to smoke. He didn’t approve of our practice. It wasn’t the idea of shovelling hormones into people whose hormones were all over the place that he objected to. Just that when, as he put it, the word got around that a pretty young girl (he had that kind of voice, the kind of voice you could say that with, then) was on the pill it was people like me that were the problem. Me? You’re like dogs with a plate of meat, he told me. I was shocked.
You’re like dogs with a plate of meat, he told me. I was shocked.
And all the while we could be heroes. And nothing could keep us together. And then nothing much that I listened to from David Bowie until Heathen, twenty? thirty years later? I liked that. Then nothing for another decade until the desolate survivor-story of Where Are We Now. I haven’t heard Blackstar. Not except the Radiohead version, the one that like so much of Bowie’s stuff, takes me back to Radio On and Bristol and Bath and silk scarves and girls with curled hair and Afghan coats. Cold cheeks and warm lips. The flash of white teeth bared in a smile in street light. Blame it on the black star. Blame it on the satellite that takes him home.
A woman in Wiltshire has just had her car stopped by a fake police car. as Morcheeba used to sing back when I was cool, who can you trust?
The odd thing, the thing about being older, is that I remember this happening before. Wiltshire isn’t exactly a crime hotspot. So two fake police car incidents made me think a bit. The one I remember was in Trowbridge. A real policeman walked over to a police van to ask the driver something and realised he wasn’t talking to anyone he knew from Trowbrodge police station. Someone had faked up a police van and got their fun just driving around pretending to be in the police. They’d never stopped anyone, or gained anything by it. They just liked playing at being a policeman.
In a world where grown adults pay hundreds of pounds to squeeze 18stone into football kit to go to watch a game, maybe that’s not so odd at all, really. Me, I’d have chosen a cowboy outfit. But Trowbridge was always odd. A couple of years after the fake police car another van got someone arrested. It was camouflage. It belonged to whoever had taken over the old army-surplus shop that sold sand-coloured canvas haversacks and Canadian army greatcoats for sixth formers, back when that was what sixth formers wore. As a tip, maybe it’s best if you do break in to the army gun room and steal a Sterling machine pistol, or know who did, it might be better to keep a lower profile than cruising around town looking like you’re auditioning for The A Team. As I said, a strange place, Wiltshire.
I used to research things. That was my job. I stopped doing it when the internet told everyone they knew everything anyway, because we live in an entitled world of stupid. And I couldn’t be bothered with telling people what they were already paid to know. I didn’t have the patience any more to sit there while people just wanted their prejudices confirmed and blamed the research and therefore me if their prejudices were shown to be just that and nothing more. Especially then.
Stupid people wear me out. Especially when they pay people not to call them stupid.
The decision to bomb Syria must count as one of the most stupid things I’ve seen in a long time, just on statistics alone.
The ISIS attack on the cafe in France killed over 150 people. It was utterly horrible. Nobody there deserved to die. So how much more horrible must it be when over ten times that many people are killed?
Imagine 1,700 people killed and 180,000 injured, not just once, but over and over again? Every year. In the UK.
Please don’t say that’s really horrible, because you don’t think it is. In fact, you think that’s an acceptable fact of life in exchange for the convenience of driving to the supermarket.
Meanwhile, the average number of people killed in the UK per year is……5. That’s the average from 2001 to 2011, including 7/7, which bumped up the average massively.
Five people dead is too many. Nobody could argue with that.
And at the same time 1,700 is just one of those things.
The Christmas lights are on in Aldeburgh, shining blue and white in the dark. It’s meant to look festive. It just reminds me how empty this place is when the summer’s tourists and weekenders aren’t here. The Christmas tree placed out there on the shingle beach is standing on its own, no lights, no tinsel, surreally placed where no tree ever grew for reasons, as Hunter Thompson used to say, that were never made clear.
It’s lonely. It reminds me of this time last year. I’d met someone again who I used to know but by then she was living in the dark. Smiling, but looking worried and scared almost all of the time. She was crucified with toothache, so much so that she couldn’t arrange a dentist because of the pain. I got her an appointment, drove her there, sat and waited with her so she didn’t have to go in alone. We went across the road to a pub afterwards. She bought a Christmas card there, wrote it on the bar and gave it to me, more a letter than a card.
In all of our time last winter I remember only night or darkening evening or a morning so bone-numbing cold that it might as well have been night, walking her dogs early in the morning, letting myself in quietly so she could sleep an extra hour. Her little dog barked though.
“I knew it was you,” she said. “She only barks for you.”
I miss those dogs and the lights going on in houses we passed as we walked out along the river path, over the narrow plank, so narrow I had to help the little dog become brave enough to cross into fields where there were no footprints, no sgn that anyone had been there since the floods. And later, another day in the teeth of a gale, in bright cold that made you think your fingers might snap off, walking a new path up along the hill, back down by another route, thinking that soon, in just a few weeks there would be bluebells here, the way there were when we met.
The bluebells came but we had gone by then. I never found her again. It was too dark. I hear her still, especially on evenings like this, when the Christmas lights shine in an empty street. I can still hear her footsteps, never in synch with mine.
I was discussing the use of English today, touching lightly on the devastating potential of the word “actually,” a topic never even mentioned in TEFL course books, which is a surprising omission, actually. You see what I did there?
Some words and phrases go out of date. Describing something as ‘spruced up’ when you mean making something smarter instantly labels you irredeemably 1950s, but in an odd, other side of the Iron Curtain sort of way, as if you popped round to Kim Philby’s Moscow flat for a chat rather too often. Personally, I think Leslie Phillip’s English is as near the apogee of sophistication as it gets, but I’m old and irritating anyway.
https://youtu.be/Wdysfh8r6ZA
Actually, accent, for some (well, ok, me then) is as important as what’s actually said, actually. Thinking about it reminded me of a time I was trying to get hold of someone I didn’t know and had never met. I’d just bought something on eBay and was trying to go and collect it from the person at work, but I only had his home number. I rang it. A woman answered, with a kind of voice and accent that wasn’t mine.
I explained I just needed to phone her husband, it turned out, about the thing he’d just sold me. Yes, he’d mentioned it. She didn’t say actually. I sometimes get a bit hazy with names. Especially when I don’t really need to know them or think I don’t, which has the same effect.
He’s at work. Ok, I said, should I call him there? She needed to find his work number.
It’s Steve Nidge.
The woman went off to get the rest of the number.
The English among you, or at least those who have a passing familiarity with Hertfordshire and/or me will know what was going to happen.
So, I said. Do I ask for Steve?
Sorry?
Steve, I said. He’s your husband’s boss, is he? I ask for him and he what, gets him to come to the phone? Ok.
She had no idea what I was talking about. I had no idea why she had no idea. Our common language had dumped us into a conversational cul-de-sac that neither of us could see any possible way out of.
It’s just one of the things that foreigners find so hard to understand: if you’re English, foreigners are always foreigners. It doesn’t matter if they’re living in their own country as they have for 3,000 years and you just got off the plane there. They are foreign. No English person ever is. But that doesn’t mean we all speak the same language.
Even when we say ‘Of course, there I suppose we’re foreign to them!!’ but it can’t really be said without at least a widening of the eyes and a little jutting of the chin if not a little shriek of laughter to show it couldn’t really be true. Not really. It’s English, you see. It’s how she is spoke. I wrote about it once, myself. It’s as much what isn’t said.
I discovered Hans Falada via a friend, who recommended Alone In Berlin. I say recommended – she insisted I read it, not least because a relative of hers had died in circumstances not entirely dissimilar to those of the hero and heroine who fell foul of the Gestapo. As another relative had captained the ship that captured the Enigma machine, maybe history balanced that one up a little. But irrelevant. Little Man, What Now? is nothing like Alone In Berlin. Nothing.
OK, the central characters are firmly at the bottom end of the social scale again and the latter half of the book is firmly set in Berlin, but a Berlin of straggling suburbs and allotments rather than the tram-infested zentrum.
This is about poverty and hopelessness and despair and struggling to survive and being a tiny, disregarded, probably un-necessary cog in a huge machine that you can’t see the purpose of. And at exactly the same time it isn’t. It’s a love story, not just of the Little Man for his Lambchen, but a story about love and trust and faith in each other. It’s intensely moving, not just because you know with each passing page that as the characters know too, their world won’t last but unlike them, you know why and how and what’s going to happen.
The Nazis are going to get in. Berlin is going to be demolished. The Little Man is going to be drafted. Lambchen is almost certainly going to be raped and the rest of the world is going to look the other way then pretend it didn’t really happen for the rest of time, because of what some politicians she had no control over did. And then the Russians are going to cut their country in two and if Pinneburg and Emma and their son, the Shrimp, somehow survive then they’re going to be living in the GDR until the Wall comes down, when they will be in their 80s.
But somehow, you get the feeling that maybe, just maybe they might get through even all of this, all of these horrors they don’t even know about, that Hans Falada didn’t know about, back in 1932 when this was written. And if they don’t, or didn’t, you feel that they did their best. And that’s pretty much all anyone can do.
Don’t be put off by the fact that this was the book that lead directly to Hans Falada’s death. It sold massively. So much so that it was turned into a film. In Hollywood. By Jews. You see the problem? You would have done if you lived in Germany in the mid-1930s.
Don’t be put off by the age of this book. The view from the bottom of the 99% upwards could have been written last week. Ignore the fact you’ve never heard of this book. Ignore the fact it was written in German. It will leave you quiet and sad and happy at the same time, wondering if maybe, just possibly, love will find a way after all.
It’s Rememberance Sunday. The Prime Minister has gone to the Cenotaph and done his very best SadFace, even if being David Cameron he looks like an eight year old who can’t tell Nanny he needs a new dog because he wasn’t supposed to set light to the old one in the first place.
Without the slightest sense of irony the BBC are happily broadcasting stories explaining why we have to invade Syria despite the fact that hardly anyone can even point to it on a map without names on it because as usual, “they” are threatening to destroy ‘our way of life.’ Unlike say, a Home Secretary demanding to be able to see exactly which websites you visited, when, all of you. Perhaps like Patrick Rock, one of David Cameron’s special advisors, who collected child sex images on his computer, but somehow that wasn’t specifically mentioned. When it comes to destroying our way of life we don’t need any help from outside, thanks.We’ve got it. If you want a job doing properly you do it yourself.
Meanwhile a Russian airplane has exploded in Egypt because the airport security is a joke, as everyone has known for always, so it’s going to be another bonanza at Luton for airport security who were wondering what they were going to do about Christmas again.
Everyone I know who has left the army tells the same story. One word out of place and you aren’t just out on your ear but the roof will fall on you. ‘ The Army won’t just turn its back. It’ll stab you in yours.
I remember being told about a soldier in Northern Ireland whose officer was shot and down on the ground. The soldier jumped into the armoured car they had which happened to have a .50 Browning on top and opened fire at the flats where the shots had come from. Brownings are serious kit. There is nothing on a High Street you could hide behind that would save you. The shooting stopped, chiefly because the flat disintegrated, along with whoever was doing the shooting.
The army thought, in the circumstances, that things could have been done a little more discretely. So they asked the soldier to resign. He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong so he wasn’t inclined to do this having done pretty archetypal soldier stuff. OK, said the army. We’ll give your name to the Press when they ask what happened. Your choice.
Someone told me how he personally got turned over when Operation Stakeknife was being investigated. He was arrested by Special Branch in his flat, mob-handed and armed with sub-machineguns. He said he was quite flattered that they obviously thought he was Jason Bourne instead of just a fairly junior staff officer. He was only reaching for his jumper as it turned out, which was why he was able to tell me the story. They hung him out to dry. He hadn’t done anything, he wasn’t charged with anything, he’d served in Afghanistan and Iraq, killed people and almost been killed. The Army made it impossible for him to carry on there. The Prime Minister personally apologised to the journalist involved. The person I talked to is still waiting.
Another word for nothing left to lose
We pretend to remember. We don’t want to, or only to spin it into a version that suits the government better. The BBC’s Cenotaph broadcast this morning talked about ‘the dead of two World Wars,’ as they always do, then slipped in the compulsory bit about protecting our freedom, then reminded us that he who seeks peace must prepare for war/it isn’t over yet/brave little Belgium/Our Brave Boys are still dying by telling us about the two RAF men killed in Afghanistan last month.
Which only begged two questions, the first being since when did the Afghan crusade had the moral equivalence of World War Two, although the reasoning of Saudi Arabians working from Germany and living in the US with flame-proof passports justified invading Afghanistan and Iraq in much the same way that shooting an arch-duke in Sarajevo inevitably meant UK conscripts defending a canal in Flanders. Obvious, really.
The other question unaddressed by the BBC was exactly what the two RAF men were doing there, given that the Afghan campaign was supposed to have ended in 2014. Since they weren’t by definition ‘defending freedom’ (because freedom won, remember?) it would be quite hard to see how their deaths were the same thing at all. The British Army lost more people to traffic accidents in Afghanistan than it did to any enemy.
But it doesn’t matter. We’re wallowing in young men’s blood for another year, dipping our hands like Jacqui Kennedy screaming out of the car in Dallas, but without the few shreds of dignity she had left, nor the justification. So far as I can see, we always will.
