Lesser known facts

I’m trying to find out some things that have been forgotten, to help me with a story I’m trying to write. The address of a bakery in Bremen in 1945. The date the city was captured. I think that was May 5th, 1945, but I wasn’t there. The day a man in Czechoslovakia decided enough was enough and he was walking home, 700 kilometres, knowing at each step that if the Gestapo found him and checked his papers they wouldn’t bother with a blindfold and a last cigarette.

How do you make that decision? How do you decide that’s it, I’m gone? I’ve never been good at that and luckily my life hasn’t involved decisions as big as that. But I’d still like to find some of these things out. The web doesn’t always help, although it’s easier than it was before that was around. Some of the things you read there simply aren’t true, and some people seem to leave their brains off when they write things.

Were Germans in Hamburg in 1943 evacuated to America?

Where do you even start with that? Why do people hijack airplanes and fly them into the World Trade Centre? It’s the same sort of question. Just totally stupid and self-referential. Y’all’d sure have been all talkin’ Nazi iffen it hadn’t been fer us. And some of it’s just plain wrong.

The first shot of World War II in Europe was fired 20 years, 9 months, 19 days and 18 hours after the last shot of World War I was fired.  It was fired from the 13,000 ton German gunnery training battleship Schleswig Holstein.

Well, no. No it was not. I know this for a fact. The first shot of World War II in Europe was fired from a Webley & Scott revolver, in a Mayfair townhouse bedroom, before a ball, when a young British officer was shot. I know. Because he told me.

In one of my lives I’ve had a house in Stow on the Wold, exactly where and just at the end of the time when you might expect to find a still active officer-class survivor of World War II living there, even if he did only just survive. He lived next door to my old house next door to the huge old pub at the bottom of the square. I wish I’d kept it, but the past is another country and besides, the wench who used to call round occasionally may or may not be dead. It was quite a long time ago.

The Major, as he was when I knew him, was just a young subaltern in 1939 but his parents were stonking rich, certainly rich enough to have their own town house in Mayfair. They threw a ball specifically to celebrate their only son’s commission and he decided to celebrate by going with his chum to a decent tailor to collect their brand new dress uniforms for the ball. On their way home they collected the new pistols they were still allowed to buy for themselves in those days, as officers still did and being eighteen or so and there being no television, went to see a cowboy film before they went home to change. Dress uniforms in proper bags from the tailors and brand new heavy black pistols on their belts they went to see their film and got back to Mayfair in

A bullet nearly half an in ch across really messes-up a new dress uniform.
A bullet nearly half an in ch across really messes-up a new dress uniform.

plenty of time to bath and change and lace Brilliantine through their hair, chummed up together in the same bedroom in the innocent manner of the times. Both of them unloaded their identical pistols and tossed the bullets onto the eiderdown while they practised their quick draw in front of the mirror, in the style of Tom Mix and Jimmy Cagney.

My neighbour was the first to get bored. War had been declared and these weren’t toys after all and there was a ball to go to and the little band was warming up downstairs and despite all of this, they were both nominally on active service, so in case the Germans invaded Mayfair that night he re-loaded his revolver and laid it on the bed before he finished dressing in his new uniform and slipped his Sam Brown belt and shiny holster on.

As his chum did, as well, but being not very old, his chum decided to have one last try at clearing leather, as if the armed might of the Wermacht would be stopped in its tracks by a teenager with a pistol who was quick on the draw.

As if in a car crash, as if in a dream, my neighbour told me how although he could see what was happening he couldn’t say anything as his chum picked up the pistol he himself had just loaded, identical to his own except for the then-unfamiliar weight of the six bullets, aimed it at him and pulled the trigger. For fun. Because it was empty.

Except as happens with guns, it wasn’t. After the enormous noise had rolled around the room and the smoke started to clear he walked downstairs, down the huge main staircase, into the room they had been going to use as the ballroom and said “I believe I’ve been shot.”

He never took part in active service, or not outside England, anyway. And that was a true story. I wish I could remember his name but really, it doesn’t matter. What does is that the history books tell just a fraction of the story.

And sometimes, talking only about the very big things instead of the small ones, they’re not true at all.

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Trying to understand

German children, 1945.
German children, 1945.

Nothing you’re going to read here is new. No ground-shattering insights. No finally-revealed truths. I wish there were. There aren’t any. Almost everyone knows you shouldn’t go around killing other people and the people who don’t know that you can’t talk to anyway, because there isn’t any point.

I’ve spent the morning trying to understand people. I started reading about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, someone you might never have heard of in exactly the same way I hadn’t until this morning. He was a German Lutheran who entered the church. Two days after the Nazi Party really kicked off in a big way he started making speeches about how crap an idea Nazism was. When he tried this on the radio the broadcast went silent, not entirely surprisingly.

He went to America, to London, to Norway, he went to all sorts of places until inevitably the Gestapo killed him, just a few weeks before the end of the war. He seems to have worked for Admiral Canaris in the Abwehr, the German intelligence organisation, which was how he was able to travel so easily and why he stayed alive so long. The Abwehr seemed to have a rivalry with the Gestapo, the other intelligence operation, which was the one that eventually knocked on Bonhoeffer’s door very early one morning.

I don’t know anything about this stuff. All I knew was Bonhoeffer’s saying that people who stay silent, people who know and refuse to do anything are just as guilty as the people who do the bad things. It’s something I’ve always believed, coming from a family that lied and stayed silent about almost everything, but especially the physical and emotional abuse carried out within it. If you know and keep your mouth shut you aren’t doing nothing, you’re doing a great deal. You’re protecting the people doing it, actively. The same way that not voting protects the people you pretend you didn’t vote for when in fact you did, by not voting against them.

Spending the morning trying to find out more about all of this was not the most fun I’ve ever had. It lead straight to the ludicrous David Irving, whose ‘scientific’ analysis claiming to have found no trace of cyanide in gas chambers rested on the evidence of someone who wasn’t a scientist in the first place. There is a pile of testimony, not just from camp survivors but from guards as well, with plenty saying “it wasn’t me guv,” or they didn’t have a choice or the eternal favourite ah-yes-but-others-were-worse-than-me but none that I read this morning saying no, they weren’t gas chambers, they were just places we de-loused clothes in, or tried to fix leaky car exhaust pipes, like Kwik-Fit, that’s all it was, honest. I spent a lot of time reading through the Nizkor Project files. None of them said anything like that. The testimony read the same way other material from that time does, the same phrasing, the same ways of speaking. I’ve read a lot of it. I’ve talked to people who were there.

There was a pile of lies though. “They all knew about it” was one of them. There was no internet. When the Red Army Faction tried to radicalise Hamburg dockers in the early 1960s, telling people their phones were being tapped, they missed the middle-class point that back then, nearly twenty years later, most people still didn’t have phones. People didn’t drive to work en masse in the 1940s and look out of the window at the barbed wire fences when they stopped to do their lippy at the lights. There was something of a war on. And most people didn’t have cars.

This isn’t really about the war, although it haunted my parents’s generation and many of my teachers at school, from the primary school English teacher who insisted that the American forces ‘weren’t on our side,’ to the ex-Paratrooper PE instructor everyone respected, but for his fairness rather than his stabby/shooty ability with a Sykes-Fairbairn knife and a Sten gun. It’s about the other mass killing going on, but even that’s a nonsense.

There are plenty of mass killings going on, all over the world. We’re told about the ones that are good for us, the ones the news organisations and the government want us to know about. We’re not told in any detail  about the conflicting theories about the death of hundreds of people in an airplane over Ukraine; we’re told the Russians did it, one way or another. We’re not told where the mysterious tunnels and rocket launcher sites the IDF keeps not destroying in Gaza actually are or how many of them there are or how come the primitive rocket launchers keep manufacturing themselves in Gaza when there isn’t any electricity any more, no port, no airport and no way in or out. We’re not told why it’s ok to invade other countries like Iraq and totally destroy infrastructure there, then rebuild it and give the reconstruction contracts to the Vice-President’s company without competitive tender. We’re told what we need to know. And it leaves me with questions.

If the Nazis set-out to kill every Jew in the Riech, why did they leave any? Why did they start winding the programme down in 1943? Why did they do it in the first place? Why wouldn’t Churchill and the British government have any serious talk with Bonhoeffer? Or with Hess, if it was in fact Rudolf Hess who turned up in Scotland? What did Hitler and his best political mates have against Jews? Why don’t we all know about the German resistance, not just about Bonhoeffer but the doomed White Rose group or at the other end of the social scale the Eidelweiss Pirates, the working class Hamburg kids who used to hunt Hitler Youth recruits and beat them up?  Why is it ok to occupy somewhere illegally in the face of more UN resolutions than were ever passed against any other country and the US, the fearless defender of Gahd, mom and democracy, whose troops marched off to Iraq fatuously declaring they were ‘honour bound defending freedom’ has absolutely nothing to say about it?

Unidentified US pilot at Leiston, between June 1943-45. The puppy sits on a drop-tank.
Unidentified US pilot at Leiston, between June 1943-45. The puppy sits on a drop-tank.

Why? Why can’t we be told and why to any of it anyway? Is it just what we do, us humans, the worst, most adaptive destructive monkeys?

I think it is. A few years ago I met a man who was then in his eighties, who’d flown Mustang fighters for the USAAF from Leiston in Suffolk, an airfield a few miles from my house. He was from Ohio and spoke with that slow, gentle Mid-West tone that belied the fact that he’d been trained specifically to kill people, for no other purpose. He stayed in my house for ten days for two summers. There was a lot of swing music. A lot of beer and memory.

He told me a lot of things about the closing days of the war, how he’d been sent to Germany along with the rest of his squadron just a few weeks after the end of the war, how he’d had one date with a German girl and decided he’d live longer if he didn’t after someone opened up on him with a sub-machine gun just after he kissed her goodnight. He never found who it was after he spent an hour hiding in a dark wood until he was pretty sure the ex had gone. He told me about sleeping with a loaded .45 under his pillow after leftover German guerillas calling themselves Werewolves had promised to sneak into the allied bases and kill the invaders in their beds. He told me about a time when his flight had attacked four German aircraft and destroyed all of them and how he felt guilty admiring the incredible beauty of the blue-green flash of two of the aircraft as they exploded. How at least the two young men inside died instantly, unlike the other two who had a minute or more to fall to earth with the pieces of their aircraft falling around them.

He told me about the camp he’d seen.

He told me about piles of bodies. It doesn’t make a penny’s-worth of difference whether there were a hundred or a thousand or ten million, or whether they died from gas or bullets or typhoid or starvation. None of them needed to. None of them should have. He told me about how his squadron saw this and how they decided to go into the nearest town. They rounded up every German they could find at gunpoint and marched them through the camp, young and old, so nobody could say afterwards that they didn’t know. The mayor of the little town killed himself soon after that. When the last German had been lead through the camp the young Americans had another conversation. What say they stop by the armoury and just go back into town and kill every last one of those bastards? This was a serious discussion item. A very senior officer had to stop it because a lot of the junior officers were onboard with the idea. It was a popular theme.

So I can understand people being so sickened that they think the only thing to do is to do the same thing. I can’t understand why people need to lie about what they were doing, or what they intend to do. People like David Irving, American Presidents, the IDF PR department I can’t understand at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Before the war

 

You know who they are. Everyone knows who they are. They're you.
You know who they are. They’re you.

Before The War

 

Before the war in our hearts

We kissed on the platform.

The guard blew his whistle.

Wooden doors slammed shut

Minding our fingers.

My hand on your waist.

Your fingers on my shoulder.

Remembering other times

And our hands and hearts

And when I remember that now

I know it didn’t happen.

There were no steam trains

Long before you were born.

I didn’t wear a hat or a British Warm.

You didn’t wear an A line skirt

And a long woollen coat

And we weren’t afraid of babies.

There were plenty of things

We were afraid of

But not that. And we didn’t talk

About them anyway, so it didn’t matter.

It wasn’t as if they could get in the way.

There were no cheery porters

Carrying our bags for a tanner tip.

‘Blimey, thanks guvnor,

You’re a gent and no mistake.’

It wasn’t ever that way in our lives.

Django Reinhardt didn’t play as our Blue Train

Wheeled down to the Cornish Riviera

We didn’t take the Boat Train to the Continent

Via Harwich, tapping our feet in memory

Of Sidney Bechet on clarinet at the Trocadero

The night before; via all the places

Where once other heroes queued in line

Embarking or demobbed, waiting patiently

For their lives to begin again,

The ones that could.

So why do I remember it this way?

You’re still here. We are, maybe.

Who is it talking to me?

Why do I seem to see a woman’s face as if in fog

Sometimes until I look again

And there’s no-one there?

There never was.

Who is it calling to me, telling me be nice

It doesn’t matter, nothing does?

Only love. Take care.

Make love, take love while it’s there.

Call the ceasefire.

Agree terms, an honourable peace,

Even unconditional surrender

If you mean it. But stop the fighting.

Put up your bright swords

Put down your arms

Put your fingers on each other’s lips

And kiss. Do it now.

While your hearts are still bare.

 

(c) Carl Bennett 2014

 

Just to clarify, no, I haven’t had a massive bust-up with anybody. Quite the opposite. This is a poem. It’s a first take, down in one like a Saturday night cocktail. It probably needs a bit of tweaking. But like any fiction, while it might call to you and I hope it does it isn’t real. But as the other Bladerunner said right at the end of the film, then again, what is?

 

 

 

 

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The balls-ache reviewer

Suffolk is still haunted by the war, specifically by the airfields that made George Orwell who lived here call England Airstrip One in 1984, a tribute to the fact that where I live you can’t drive more than ten miles in any direction except the sea without coming across yet another mile long strip of concrete crossed by two more to make a giant A. Or where they’re gone, a trading estate and a small memorial, usually with two flag poles, a plaque and a wreath. The numbers are horrifying. 82 dead at the little fighter airfield down the road in Leiston, given that these were single seater aircraft. Two hundred and forty something at a plaque I read in Thetford yesterday, a tribute to a Czechoslovakian squadron there, the kind of people Nigel Forage wouldn’t let polish his Lobbs. If he actually has any.

Flying Fortress, Rougham WW11I read this poem when I got home from work, the ball-turret gunner. It’s very, very short. The ‘analysis’ of it is why people don’t like poetry, or English, or school.

POEM EXPLICATED : The ball turret gunner as allegory of the modern state

Wednesday, 04 July 2012 06:30 Mark Jensen
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In 1945, Randall Jarrell published a short poem about the death of a ball turret gunner in the Second World War.[1]  —

THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER
By Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Randall Jarrell was a genius. But to understand the poem you have to know several things.

Thing One: There was an enormous air war over Germany from 1943 to 1945 after General Eisenhower decided not just to take the fight to the enemy, but simply to destroy Germany. Not nullify its army or make it militarily incapable, but along with Bomber Harris, decide to destroy it.  I met an American fighter pilot. I asked him how before sat nav and onboard radar and identification transponders, when outside of radio from base the only way to link up with the bombers to protect them was to see them and fly close enough to be handy but not so close the gunners hosed you down with fifty calibre on general principles, which apparently happened a lot more than once when mere mortals standing five miles high got flak happy. He told me that when you were supposed to escort 1,000 bomber raids all you had to do was follow the con-trails in the sky, the water vapour in the exhausts cooling and making a road in the sky. You don’t assemble that many of anything if you don’t want something gone for good.

Contrails. The sharply curved ones are from the fighter escort.
Contrails. The sharply curved ones are from the fighter escort.

Thing Two:

Hanging underneath B17s and B24s was a ball-turret. It was a plexiglass dome that a small man sat in along with two machine guns spitting out one minute’s worth of bullets half an inch across. He couldn’t see anyone else for up to eight hours, as he hung suspended in his seat, separate from the land only by a thin sheet of plastic and 30,000 feet of air. You see the lump underneath the airplane, about half way along it. Ball-turret.

Thing Three: German anti-aircraft shells made black smoke when they exploded.

Thing Four: In the bomber war the USAAF flew by day. The RAF flew at night.

If Mark Jensen, whoever he is, had known all of these things instead of just some of them maybe his review wouldn’t have been the sort of tendentious bollocks that makes people vow never to read another book after they’ve left school.

 

FALLING INTO THE STATE AND AWAKING TO DIE
By Mark Jensen

United for Peace of Pierce County
July 4, 2012

The speaker in this 1945 poem is a ball turret gunner who has died.  We know almost nothing about him.  The gunner is speaking to us, mostly in a flat tone, but occasionally with terse lyricism, about his death.  Since he is dead, the speech is disembodied.  It is, evidently, the gunner’s voice as imagined by the poet.

Properly speaking, there is no setting of time or place for his speech, as is also the case for his death, in a sense.  The casual reader probably imagines that the gunner has died at night.  While this is likely enough, it need not be so, since the blackness of the “black flak” may refer to the doom it brings the gunner rather than the time of day, and the “nightmare fighters” may be nightmarish because they are what he most feared.  The gunner’s death occurred “six miles from earth,” so far about the planet’s surface that the life below seems merely a “dream” — so abstracted (“into the State”) from ordinary life that his death, too, seems a dream, a “nightmare.”  But of course it is not a dream, as the brutal final line of the poem blandly conveys.  

What black meant.
What black meant.

I can’t even bear to go on. Already the total ignorance (no, the black is about the time of day) is balanced only by the high school conviction that no other interpretation is possible. And utter crap. The black flak, or anti-aircraft shells exploding, was black because that was the colour it was. Nothing to do with the time of day, which was in any case day rather thannight. Utter, utter bollocks, as English teachers should be encouraged to say faced with crap like this.

This is a shot-up ball turret. You can see the problem.
This is a shot-up ball turret. You can see the problem.

As for “the nightmare fighters may be nightmarish because they are what he most feared,” THE BALL TURRET GUNNER WAS HANGING OUTSIDE THE SODDING AIRCRAFT. HE WAS USUALLY, ALONG WITH THE TAIL GUNNER, THE FIRST ONE TO BE SHOT AT. And breathe.

The poem’s first words remind the reader that the gunner had a mother, was ofwoman born, and was taken from her (suggesting his extreme youth) and thrust so naturally into the service of “the State” that it seemed he “fell into” his military role.  But in fact there was nothing natural about it:  crammed into his “ball turret,” the gunner is “hunched” and reduced to animal-like discomfort (“my wet fur froze”).  Calling attention to the outrageousness of something that appears so natural, or rather so socially obligatory, is the central purpose of the poem.

And another central purpose of the poem is a reminder that when you fly for eight hours and are terrified for several of them and you are five miles up in the sky in winter without any heating and no onboard WC, there are inevitable consequences which the reviewer might have thought about if he wasn’t writing bollocks like ‘of woman born.’

And what is this outrageous thing?  That war snatches boys from their mothers, stuffs them into the belly of the state, and consumes their lives — then “washes” them “out” to make room for more.  Consciousness of this seems only latent in the laconic gunner, who has a hard-bitten economy of speech.  No romantic he.  This tone is achieved by simple vocabulary and dispassionate declarative sentences uttered from beyond the grave — the grave his mutilated remains, “washed . . . out of the turret with a hose” (a steam hose, Jarrell said in a commentary on the poem), probably never had.

Crap, crap and more crap. Only latent, this consciousness? Nobody onboard those aircraft wasn’t conscious of the fact that statistically, they weren’t coming home. How does anyone write stuff like “No romantic he”?

The action of this compact poem is very simple:  from “sleep,” and not even his own sleep, the gunner “woke” — and “died.”  The brevity of it all almost suggests a revelation, a revelation of a bleak, “black,” “nightmare,” sort.  Instead of awaking in a dark wood, like Dante, to be guided by Virgil to a beatific vision, the gunner awakes to death and recounts his own demise as if it were some nihilistic vision.

I don’t really know what else being shredded by 20mm cannon and your squashy remains needing a hose to get them off the airplane could actually be, other than a nihilistic vision, the sort of thing people buried in a bucket might have. My father was in the RAF in the war. He was ground crew, not the pilot he pretended to be, but he once let slip that cleaning out shot-up aircraft was punishment duty.

The events the gunner describes do have a dreamlike quality:  “falling” from his “mother’s sleep . . . into the State,” “hunch[ing] in [the State’s] belly” until his “wet fur froze . . . [s]ix miles from earth,” he is “loosed from [earth’s] dream of life” before being loosed from life itself by the dire, fell forces to which “the State” has exposed him.  But in the final line the dreamlike quality disappears:  “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”

From another’s sleep, awakening to death; then disposal of the remains.  Who has betrayed whom?  Who is to blame?  The reader is invited to wonder whether the mother is responsible, or the State (with its capital S), or the “nightmare fighters” with their “black flak” (rhymes withack-ack), or even the gunner.  Are we all to blame?  By phrasing the initial line in such an artfully oblique manner, Jarrell invites the reader to turn his poem about like a rough-cut jewel, seeking the proper perspective.  For surely there must be a proper perspective.  But it is in the nature of war to instill doubt about this — a doubt that is appallingly expressed in the final, banal image of “a hose” in action.

The gunner — merely a boy — is “loosed from [earth’s] dream of life,” then “washed . . . out of the turret with a hose.”

Look more closely at the first line.  “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State.”  Falling here is metaphorical — it implies a change from an exalted condition to a degraded condition, from the condition of precious beloved offspring to that of instrumentalized military functionary.  But the fall is not from the mother’s love, but from her “sleep.”  “From” (the poem’s first word) her sleep.  Note that from can mean many things.  It can refer to a starting point — and is a “mother’s sleep” not the starting point of us all?  But from can also refer to a separation or an exclusion — by going to war, the gunner had to leave his home behind.  Finally, from can also refer to cause :  the gunner “fell into the State”because his mother was sleeping — was perhaps unaware, or not cognizant, of what her son was doing — had she known, had she been awake, perhaps his doom could somehow have been avoided, or evaded.  Perhaps he would not have had to die as he did, to die not as some heroically falling warrior, but to die as a mangled, shredded, torn, disfigured deposit of matter smeared on the walls of a ball turret that has to be “washed . . . out” (to be used again).

In this poem, “the State” has a “belly.”  But unlike in his “mother’s” belly, in “its belly” he was not warmed and nurtured, rather he “froze” and “died.”  Perhaps the “dream of life” that turned into a “nightmare” is not the earth’s after all, but “the State”‘s.  For “the State” is personified in the poem as a monstrous mother who consumes her young, a Gorgon.  Enlistment is entering into a voracious vagina dentata that kills.  This is a Gorgon that wears no mask; rather it is her own offspring that she transforms into objects of horror — all the more horrible in this poem for the ironic litotes of the final line, for of course it is not “me” that is “washed . . . out of the turret with a hose” but a putrescible semiliquid agglomeration of organic matter fit only to be “washed . . . out” with a (steam) hose.

And yet more bollocks. And yet more repetition. Five miles high if you aren’t wearing an oxygen mask you will be dead in seconds. So you can be pretty sure that the writer, knowing this, whatever else he had in mind, certainly didn’t have anything unmasked in there as well.

The entire poem becomes a symbol, perhaps, of the potential relation of the individual to the modern state.  

I detest the word ‘perhaps.’ Is it or isn’t it? At best, it’s just a filler word. At worst, as it is here, it’s ‘let’s crap on for another five minutes and if anyone says ‘that’s bollocks actually’ you can still say ah yes but I said perhaps. So second year.

After all, this is a poem written in 1945, the year of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Is it all of human history that Randall Jarrell has, perhaps unwittingly, allegorized in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”?  The poem was written in a dark disordered time.  And the rhythm of the poem is disordered, too.  Only the last line, which reports how his remains are cleaned up, is ordered, anapestically: (???|????|???|????).  The other lines of the poem are in a state of metrical disorder, one plausible reading of which is this:

???|??|??|?????

???|???|????|??

??|??|?|?????

??|???|???|???

In the third and fourth lines, when the aircraft is under attack, the disorder is most extreme.  The rhyme scheme, too, is disordered and defective:  abcdb, with no rhyme in the third and fourth lines.  

Jarrell’s poem is a masterpiece.  So well-received was it that he feared that it would be his only literary legacy.  But could there be a finer one?

All this review is in the main is repetition, but there is a huge amount of pomposity seasoned with nonsense and gibberish as well. Why does it annoy me so much? Perhaps because I see these memorials most days, silent at the side of East Anglian roads.

There are no words worth saying. They killed in thousands. They died in thousands. Remember them all.
There are no words worth saying. They killed in thousands. They died in thousands. Remember them all. And don’t let it happen again.

 

Perhaps because of the numbers on the plaques, the Aarons and Fletchers and Ottos, the smart young men in the recruiting films who never came home again. Perhaps because anyone who can dick about, inserting vagina dentata into this straightforward poem has issues not just with vaginas but seems to feel a war is as welcoming, otherwise the reference makes no sense at all; but maybe, being American and safely in no danger of being bombed except by disgruntled homegrown pretend fascists, that’s exactly how he sees wars. And who the ***K says explicated, anyway?

Within a month someone in the UK government is going to say in public, out loud, that it would be a good idea to send soldiers to fight in the Ukraine. I think this is why this stupid analysis of this short poem irritates me so much. It misses the point entirely, so wrapped in its own self-importance.

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Nazi Jazz Rules

I found this on the web tonight, looking for something about Django Reinhardt. I have not altered anything at all in these ten rules. I’m still stunned that this was written.

 

170px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-2000-0110-500,_BDM,_GymnastikvorführungAt Most 10% Syncopation

  1. Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands;
  2. In this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;
  3. As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones, so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;
  4. So-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs);
  5. Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.);
  6. Also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches);
  7. The double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions;
  8. Plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden;
  9. Musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat);
  10. All light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.

 

 

Reich Gauleiter for the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia signed this day. Genießen Sie den Abend. Guten tag.

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Last Defences

I was walking yesterday, up along an old path called Into The Light, along the road a little way then north towards the railway, along an old drove road, towards the house of someone I used to know.

A man was burning a tree fallen in the storms and the pheasants shot into the air as I walked along a cart track underneath where they’d roosted. I went and talked to someone else who knew the same person and we didn’t mention her at all. I got back in the last of the light, out of the light and said hello to someone I didn’t know to stop an old man cycling into me in the dark.

An old apple tree, planted nobody knows when on a drove road most people have forgotten. I think someone long ago threw away an apple core.
Unwanted apples on a forgotten drove road. I think someone long ago threw away an apple core.

I thought about a poem I started years ago. I’ve never been able to finish it. I thought about a girl I used to know in Cornwall and I thought about the Spring coming and the old wartime things you sometimes discover walking here, still littering the fields and hedges after what, 70 years or something. Time moves at different speeds in some places, sometimes.

I don’t know whether to call this Walking With Blue or Last Defences. Let’s stick with the second one for now.

 

Last Defences

 

March and the raw wind cradles the rooks calling.

March and the wet wind licks my face

Waiting for the Spring to start

So we can go for a walk together again.

Secret clumps of snowdrops,

Uncleared pillboxes among the hedgerows,

Winter’s last defences mowing down the unwary

As they walk along the oddly empty lane

Unthinking. The sudden burst of flowersIMG_1327

Shattering the grey, reminding you

It really will be Summer again one day.

Cock pheasants clattering,

Calling safe from the guns

Until October now.

Woodsmoke from a bonfire

Clinging to my scarf,

Walking with blue even indoors.

I remember these last days of February too.

Spring term. Mock exams.

Back when everything was new.

And walking with blue

Jeans and dove grey sweater.

It was a poem I’d started then.

I can hear me now, still walking towards me

From the other end of my life

As I walk these different fields,

Too far from home, still walking with blue.

Hello stranger. I knew it was you.

Where’ve you been all this time?

Why didn’t you write and tell me

If you were alright?

If you couldn’t say at least

Why didn’t you write to me?

Why didn’t you write?

 

 

© Carl Bennett 2104

 

 

 

 

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Year End

IMG_1648A bit like the end of term round-up, this post. If I was marking up 2013 though, I’d have to have a word with its parents and note ‘must try harder’ on its report.

What did I do this year? Some of the things I set out to do. Got rid of my house. Re-homed most of the chickens. Won the BBC Writers Room competition. Did I mention that? Oh. Ok. Well, actually, I won the BBC Writers Room competition.

With a screenplay based on my book, Not Your Heart Away, which I also finished and published this past year.

Wrote some poems.  Got a radio show. Wrote No Batteries Required, about a bankrupt chicken farmer who decides to kidnap a celebrity chef the same day the Prime Minister he was at school with goes to offer him a job as Minister of Food.

Anything else? Quite a lot. Tried to help. Lost my heart. Found it again. Put it in trust for someone who might appreciate it. Tried to stop acting like an arse quite as much as I managed to do for several months this year. Vowed to listen more and decide less. Walked a lot. I liked that. Took some decent photos. Got a new house to live in, that I think is nicer than the one I moved out of. Saw some old friends, made some old friends (no, not like that), caught up with some old friends and realised how fantastically valuable they are when you need them.

Tried to write School Lane, a story that started in Not Your Heart Away, a story about an old man who had been a young boy when he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, like almost every other small boy in Germany. And I couldn’t do it. Maybe I can next year. It became too complex, too involved, too much about Janni Schenck, the boy whose teacher beat him and his classmates up to stop them being killed by the American patrol coming to their village. Janni’s story expanded to include the Edelweiss Pirates, which meant I had to get him from Hamburg where they hung out to a small village in the mountains, where the real story, the one I heard from an old man in a pub long ago now was set, which was a story in itself.

And alarmingly, bought an electro-acoustic ukelele to do an open-mic 1940s crooner set comprising Fools Rush In, The Nearness of You and either Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens or How Much Do I Love You. Maybe. Or April Played The Fiddle. That bit might need some work. Like learning the ukelele for a start. And it’s sung impossibly high for me. I could do it fine when I was fourteen. Can’t do it now.

So this year coming, 2014 is a new start. New house. A new heart and some new friends.  See you there.

 

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All of us

I’m starting to do some background research for the story School Lane, a true story about a man I met who was had been in the Hitler Youth and objected to being called a Nazi. hjgirls I wanted to find out more about German villages and the Eidelweiss Pirates so I turned, as you do for everything these days, to Google. All I wanted to do was find some pictures that would show me a German village, so I could imagine the mood of it in my head. Richard Curtis played one song over and over again when he was writing films, so I thought I could allow myself this one small indulgence. I don’t do this a lot. Honest, guv. It was just the once. For research. For this book and that. To see what was there. That’s the only reason I was looking at pictures like that, straight up, as they used to say on The Sweeney.

There were, as you might guess, a lot of photos of Aryan maidens. I presume they were, anyway. They put me in mind of a story I heard from a man who used to fly P51 Mustangs out of Leiston airfield in WWII.  After the war he got a job as a press photographer on a newspaper, back in the days when things in small American towns were much the same as they were in James Stewart’s film Harvey. I know this country. I drove around the MidWest in a Chevrolet. I didn’t watch attack ships on fire off the shoulder of  Orion, it’s true. But I did see Nancy-Jean practising on the football field with the squad in the rain, one Saturday morning in Indiana. That was a long time before anyone had the idea they didn’t want to be one, like Ms St Vincent. Still, she was 30 when she sang that and the other girls were getting a little embarrassed.

 

You need to focus
Still wanting to be a cheerleader.
Still wanting to be a cheerleader.

One day he had an assignment to go and photograph at some girls High School out in the nowheres for some sporting event or other back in the mists of time. All the girls lined up outdoors, some twenty or so cheerleaders asked to stand stiff and straight in the Florida sunshine. Being young girls they started fidgeting and chatting to each other and he couldn’t get exactly the picture he wanted. It was just turning into one of those days.

One of those nights.
One of those nights.

Eventually he had to ask the teacher if she could ask the girls to please stay still so he could just click the shutter and get the job done. Pleasant though it was looking at cheerleaders that fine morning he had other stuff to do. Certainly, the teacher said.

“Stand still girls, the photographer wants to focus.”

No-one ever owned up to being the cheerleader who said,  “What, all of us?”

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