Christmas

A very merry Christmas to everyone!

These splendid angels are from the Priory Church, Great Malvern, Worcestershire.

 

Moscow 1981; a true story

Going to Moscow for the 1981 Gymnastics World Championships: a true story 

I had been reporting on gymnastics events for a variety of magazines since 1975, and was keen to visit the Soviet Union for a major tournament. When I heard the Americans would be boycottting the 1980 Moscow Olympics, I thought I might stand a good chance, so I wrote a request for a press pass, got a colleague to translate it into Russian, posted it off and waited. Some weeks later I got home to find the post office had left me a docket telling me that they had a registered letter from Moscow awaiting collection. "It's my tickets!" I thought. I charged down full of excitement and was handed a suspiciously thin envelope, which proved to contain a single rather grubbily-photocopied sheet of paper informing me that I had applied to the wrong place. Not only must this item have cost a fortune to send by registered post all the way from Moscow; it probably got me on some M15 list of suspects.

 Things weren't much better when later that year I applied to attend a tournament in East Berlin. In this case I did receive a very friendly invitation; the only drawback being that my the time it reached me, the event had already finished. A check of the dates on the letterhead and the postmark suggested it had sat on someone's desk for a whole month before being posted, and the fact that it was addressed to "Stoke-on-Trent, USA probably didn't help. There was less visible co-operation when I applied to the organisers of the World Student Games in Bucharest: in fact I received no reply at all; but a German friend who attended the tournament informed me that the Romanians had actually set up facilities for me in the press centre, and I should have gone. I protested that they hadn't bothered to let me know. "Oh, the Romanians never tell you anything!" he replied. "You just have to turn up!" 

However, in 1981 I did receive tickets for the World Gymnastics Championships in Moscow. The next problem was getting a visa. When there was still no sign of mine a week before the start, I rang up the travel agent, who told me that patience was needed and I shouldn't start to panic until 24 hours before the flight: such delays were standard for Soviet bureaucracy. "And I tell you, it's getting worse!" he exclaimed, "And Reagan's afraid of these people invading us!" I had visions of a mechanised offensive into Central Europe having to be postponed for lack of visas. But his advice proved right, and my documents duly arrived a whole three days before departure. 

I was the only person in our party to be searched at customs on the way in. The official read through my address book and notebook, leafed through my wallet, and carefull scrutinised the crushed Remembrance Day poppies, old tickets and screwed-up sweet papers that he found in my coat pockets and the bottom of my bag. having failed to find anything interesting, he then asked, "Vy have you come?" "I've come to see the gymnastics world championships", I explained (it said this on my visa anyway) "I sink you are too late; it has finished". "No it hasn't: it's going on till Sunday!" Since I had avoided this little trap, he lasped into apathy and let me through. 

A fellow-enthusiast, Maurice Knight from Birmingham, then caused enormous confusion at passport control. For a start, he had a joint passport but had come without his wife, so he had to explain why he had left her at home. The following dialoguethen took place:- "Your name is Maurice Kerr-niggt?" "No, my name is Maurice Knight!" "Your name is Maurice Kerr-niggt". This time it was a statement, not a question. "Yes, I know it's spelt like that, bit actually it's pronounced Knight" "Your name is Maurice Kerr-niggt". Voice from the back of the queue, "For heaven's sake, Maurice, tell her you're called Kerr-niggt or we'll be here all day!" "Oh all right then; my name is Maurice Kerr-niggt" "Go through!" Honour was satisfied: the foreigner had done as he was told. 

When we boarded the bus to our hotel, we were told that the first gymnastics we would be attending would be the women's finals the next day. Maurice and I immediately protested: what about the men's tournament that evening? We had been promised entry to all events! Elena, our guide, was sympathetic but firm: she was very sorry, but it was impossible; no tickets were left. We were thus not in a very good mood when we reached the hotel, where we found another British party about to leave for the stadium. Yes, they also had been told there were no tickets, but when they complained sufficiently some had materialised. So Maurice and I approached their guide and explained the position. Within a couple of minutes she had managed to locate two spare tickets, so Maurice and I abandoned our luggage at reception and went off to the stadium, and the competition we watched was so exciting we wouldn't have missed it for anything.

 The tournament was in many ways not well organised. The Russians were incapable of producing a printed programme for the spectators, who thus had nothing to tell them what was happening next, or who was wearing what number, let alone having nowhere to keep the scores, so at the close few had any notion of the result until the parade of the medal-winners. A few privileged officials were given printed scoresheets at the close, which I had to cadge and then spend hours copying scores out by hand. Even this was not as easy as it sounds, since the names had been translated into Cyrillic script and then back again, by someone whose command of English was distinctly shaky, with the surnames first. The resutlts were often comic. Who in the British team were Prais Heili, Iang Liza, Vezerstoun Cheril and Deivis Dzheffri? (Hayley Price, Lisa Young, Cheryl Weatherstone and Jeffrey Davis). Other nationalities were just as bad, and for the Chinese, just to be different, the surnames had been put last. Even the entry tickets were substandard: whole blocks were printed on single sheet of cheap paper without perforations, and then clumsily and inaccurately torn off one by one. 

Moscow in Novemberis cold. during the day the temperature may creep up to above zero, and the sunlight glitters on the gilded domes of the Kremlin cathedrals, but there is a bitter chill in the air when the wind blows and everyone has to wrap up well. The ground is iron-hard, there are flurries of snow, and ice begins to float on the river. It was at this precise time, forty years before our visit, that Hitler's armies ground to a halt on the Sparrow Hills within sight of the city and suffered astronomical casualties as they tried to dig in for winter. Our hotel was a modern one, opposite the Park of Economic Achievement, looking out on a monument to Soviet astronuats that consisted of a great curved rocket-trail looking like a bronze ski-slope. The hotel food wasn't bad, but when two British businessmen at our table asked for champagne they were told there wasn't any. Since several bottles were promonent on other tables this wasn't very convincing, and it took considerable badgering before someone looking like a manager appeared and contrived to locate a couple of bottles in quick order. (It was at this same hotel three years later that I had a surreal experience involving the crockery, which was rather crude and often chipped. Living as I did in Stoke-on-Trent, the world centre of china-ware, I performed the ritual of the "upside-down club": turning a plate over to find where it was made. This proved to be somewhere in East Germany, and the trade name, amazingly, was "Colditz"! In next to no time, everyone in the room was turning over their plates too and exclaiming, "Ooh, so it is!" The staff, of course, had no idea what the joke was, and when we came down for our next meal we found our party had been screened off from the everybody else. "People complained about the noise", we were told. 

Between he hotel and the stadium was a large shoe-shop. Every time we drove past on our coach, even late in the evening, there was always a long queue outside, spilling down the pavement. Eventually one of our party asked Elena the guide, "Why are all those people always queuing outside that shop?" Without batting an eyelid she replied, "It is because they have plenty of time". This was such a splendid answer that none of us could think of any riposte. And in a sense she was speaking the truth, because with goods coming into the shops so irregularly, any Muscovite who saw a queue would be advised to join it, and find out what was on sale later. (See footnote 2)

There was also a functioning Orthodox Christian church close to the hotel, with attractive bright blue onion-domes flecked with gold stars. I looked in once, to see old ladies bowing and scraping and crossing themselves before the icons: they seemed to constitute the entire congregation. The priest looked exactly like Rasputin in films. 

We were taken round the usual tourist sites each morning before going to the stadium. I didn't bother to visit Lenin in his tomb (I had seen him on a previous visit: we thought he was a waxwork), but I did go to St Basil's Cathedral on Red Square. It was much brighter externally than I remembered: perhaps it had been repainted for the 1980 Olympics. All eight of the miniature domes surrounding the central tower were different, and beneath each was a separate chapel, some being scarcely bigger than chapels. Old ladies sat inside them, swathed in blankets against the cold and lookingup from their knitting to shout "Don't touch the icons!" at the tourists. There was a guided tour of the Kremlin, with its splendid cathedrals, plus the Tsar's bell (so big that it could never be hung) and the Tsar's cannon (so big that it could never be fired - something very Russian about these!). In the Treasury was a fine collection of Sevres porcelain. I told Elena that, coming as I did from Stoke, I was interested in ceramics. She knew about Wedgwood, and said how much she liked the blue-and-white jasper ware. I told her it was still being made. "Can anyone buy it?" she asked. I felt like telling her that it wasn't reserved for high officials of the ruling party, if that was what she meant. I asked if she would like me to send her a small piece, but she was most insistent that I shouldn't. Elena was also puzzled by the fact that I owned my own house. "How can you have your own house when you're not married?" she asked. She still had to share a flat with her parents, despite being a university graduate. 

It goes without saying that we were approached on the street by locals wanting to change money or buy our clothes. A group of us met a bunch of young Muscovites headed by a youth with blond-dyed hair, a black leather jacket and an acid burn down his cheek. "You guys got any shoes you wanna sell?" he asked, with an accent suggesting he had learnt his English from old James Cagney movies. One of the American coaches described to me how he was engaged in selling his jeans to a taxi-driver, the way one does, and was haggling about the price, when the taxi-driver had a bright idea. "If you accept my price", he said, "I will give you a nice Polish girl!" "Look, mate", replied the American, by his own account, "I don't want to go home with something I can't wash off!" The taxi driver deduced from this that here was a tough bargainer. "If you don't like that", he riposted, "then I will give you a nice Russian girl!" This would appear to tell us something about he relative status of the two races. "And do you know how much we were arguing about?" the American told me, "Two bucks! He was going to give me a girl for two lousy bucks!" I never had an experience to match this, but I remembered how on a school visit some years earlier, one of the boys wanted to go swimming. There was in those days a vast open-air swimming pool in the middle of Moscow (it isn't there any more: see footnote 1), and the man in charge of the party taught him the Russian for "swimming pool" and told him to take a taxi. What happened was that the boy instantly forgot the Russian for "swimming pool", so instead waved his towel and bathing trunks at the taxi driver; who promptly made him an offer for them; and so instead of swimming he went back to the hotel and spent his gains on vodka. 

In fact there wasn't much point in selling clothes,or in changing money on the black market, since there were special shops called "berioskas" which only accepted foreign currency, and in any case, when we returned to the airport we had to account for all the roubles in our possession and then change them back at iniquitous rates. An hour into the flight, the pilot announced we were leaving Soviet airspace. A mighty cheer went up from the passengers, and two businessmen, fuelled by alcohol, started a game of cricket in the central aisle. But despite all the nonsense, none of us would regret our trip to Moscow.

 Footnote 1: the swimming pool. There was in the centre of Moscow an enormous 19th-century cathedral, dedicated to Christ the Redeemer. It was demolished under Stalin, with the intention of building a grandiose Palace of the Soviets in its place, but in the end the site became a swimming pool. After the collapse of communism, the swimming pool went and the cathedral was rebuilt. A sign of changing priorities? 

Footnote 2: a joke from late in the Soviet era. Ivan Ivanovich hears a rumour that a local shop has sausage for sale,and decides to go and buy some. "Don't be silly!" his wife tells him, "Even if they had any, they'll be out of it before you can get there!" Nevertheless Ivan goes. There is a very long queue already formed at the shop, and long before Ivan can reach the front a man comes out and announces that the sausage has all been sold. Ivan is furious. "It's a disgrace!" he shouts, "I've worked all my life for this country, and now I can't get any sausage! Our government's useless!" A large man comes up to him and says, "Comrade, calm down! Think of what would have happened in the old days if you'd spoken like that!" (he points a finger at Ivan's head and says "Bang!") "So calm down and go home!" When Ivan gets home his wife asks, "Well, was I right? Are they out of sausage?" "It's worse than that", Ivan tells her, "They're even out of bullets!".

.

Taking a Photograph

 Our new vicar had asked me to take some photos of the church in a neighbouring village, so I walked there on a path through the woods one very hot afternoon.

   The church was small and built of red sandstone, which was somewhat decayed in the tower which stood at the western end. I stood in the churchyard to the south to take my pictures, but found the view was interrupted by a number of ancient gravestones. One of them, facing the south-west corner, was the size and shape of a cabin trunk and covered in moss; its inscription left quite illegible. I climbed on top for a better view of the church, saying to the unknown occpant as I did so, "Please excuse me for this indignity; the vicar asked me to do it. I promise to say a prayer and put some money in the collection-box when I'm done!"

  I took several pictures from this position before dismounting and walking to the church door. I noticed high up on either side of the entrance two peculiar faces carved in the crumbling red stone. The right hand one was clearly a cat, grinning, but the one on the left, being somewhat decayed, was so grotesque as to be neither clearly human or demonic. It had its mouth open in a snarl, revealing a scattering of teeth. I took a photograph of it, and made a mental note to ask the vicar about it, before entering the church.

   Inside it was rather dark, but I couldn't see any way of switching on lights. There was a rather heavy rood screen, beyond which was an altar with no cross on it. The silence was absolute. I attempted to take a photograph, but my camera was dead. The battery must have expired, and I had forgotten to bring a spare. Damn!

  For no good reason, I felt increasingly uneasy. In consequence I muttered even the most perfunctory prayer before retreating, and on failing to find any collection box for my promised offering fled the building in a somewhat ignominious manner. I took one glance backwards as I walked out through the churchyard. The cat was still grinning at me; not, I thought, in a very friendly fashion. 

   As I passed through the gate I heard a bell toll, to sound the hour, I supposed; and an unpleasing sound it was; less a deep tone than something resembling an old saucepan being struck with a ladle.

   My uneasiness persisted in my journey home through the woods. I kept glancing back to see if anything was following me, though I never saw anything, nor did I meet a single person, and I was glad to reach home intact.

   That night I dreamed that a hooded and shrouded figure was standing beside my bed and leaning over me. I could not tell whether it was a man, a woman, or some creature that was entirely unhuman. I dreaded that the figure might throw back its hood, revealing the grotesque face I had seen on the church, opening its mouth wide and grinning with anticipation of a bite. In a cold sweat of fear I woke up and sat bolt upright.

   "It's not my fault!" I exclaimed out loud. " I didn't mean to insult you! The vicar asked me to take a photo! It was the only way I could do it!" 

Why teenagers shouldn't necessarily be encouraged to write!

 When I was in the 6th form, a school friend and I spent some time trying to write a play. This was in the mid-1960s, the heyday of the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd”, led by the great Samuel Beckett and the now-sadly-forgotten N. F. Simpson, and our production was intended to be very much in that vein. The curtain would rise to reveal a nondescript middle-aged couple watching television. On one side of the stage there would be a staircase ascending into the darkness. It would become apparent that the couple had never ventured up these stairs, nor did they display any curiosity as to what might lie at the top. The audience would be able to hear, though not to see, what was being broadcast on the TV, which would be of a distinctly surrealist character, during which the couple would exchange desultory and inane dialogue.

Every so often, other people would enter the stage. They would be generic types; a policeman, a poet and so forth, and each of them would have a different motive for wanting to climb the stairs. The couple would, of course, ignore them.
So far, so good, you might think. They trouble was, we had no idea of what should happen next, let alone what denoument (if any) there should be. Now it’s all very well for the audience not to be sure what might be found at the top of the stairs (in fact, usually in this sort of play, they’d be no wiser at the finish than they were at the start), but surely the authors ought to have at least some notion of what it all meant? Was the staircase perhaps a religious allegory, or what? And we simply hadn’t a clue.

So in the end we gave up, and our play duly took its place in that great gallery of abandoned projects, known to some as “the round filing-cabinet”. It was to be joined there some months later by a very different, though equally derivative, aborted production; a play for Easter, to be entitled “The arrest of Jesus, as performed by the cast of Z Cars”. Looking back, I’m inclined to believe that this latter effort was rather better, but before people start to have thoughts about mercy-killing, I’ll end by saying that that is (or to be more exact, might have been) another story.

P.S. Thought for the day:- “Youthful vanity and dullness, determined to write, will almost certainly write in the dominant form of their epoch” (C. S. Lewis; “The Allegory of Love”).

Badlands

 I found myself in a desert of mounds and hollows. In places the soft rock of which it was composed had been warped and twisted into fantastic spires and towers. Dark caverns gaped.  Everywhere was a pale yellowish brown, save where the livid sunset ahead of me stained some the colour of old blood. Nowhere was there was the least sign of life: not a single insect, not a blade of grass or the skeleton of a dead tree. Nevertheless I pressed onwards towards the light; there was nothing else that I could do.