The Master of the Angels

When Lorenzo di Prato heard the rumour that his only daughter considered herself betrothed to the young painter Tancredi, he was not pleased. He considered it entirely unfitting that he, a prosperous and respected cloth-merchant, should have his family linked by common gossip to a struggling, penniless artist. This was not the future he intended for his child. So when he confronted Gianetta, and she could not deny her friendship with the young man, he had the girl shut away in a convent until she should come to her senses.
Tancredi was saddened, and also insulted. Admittedly he was as yet unknown, but he was sure his prospects were good. Had he not been commissioned to work on the altarpiece at the new church? It would depict the Adoration of the Virgin, and he was to paint one of the side panels. He was certain that this would establish his reputation as a painter, and quickly lead to fame and wealth. But also he truly loved Gianetta, and now he missed her greatly. As the days and the weeks passed by without her, he became more and more depressed. He began to neglect his work. Increasingly he became aware that it was dull and uninspired, and yet he was unable to do anything to improve it. He took to hanging around the gates of the convent for hours at a time, hoping for just a glimpse of his beloved; but the walls were high and windowless, and no man could enter without permission.
Gianetta was also very lonely and unhappy. To ease her grief, she took to praying in quiet places away from the nuns. Especially she liked to climb to the top of the campanile, where there was a small platform: the only place in the convent from which it was possible to catch any glimpse of the city outside. Here she would pray fervently for help and deliverance. And here one day her prayer were answered; as two Beings descended in majesty from the skies and took her hands; and then in an overwhelming miracle glittering wings grew from her own shoulders, and together the three of them rose beyond the prosaic earth and soared upwards into the cloudless blue.
The only person who saw them was Tancredi, from his lonely vigil outside the nunnery gates. As soon as they had risen beyond his sight, he rushed back to his church and seized his brushes; and he painted his panel before the vision could fade from his memory. It showed three angels in brilliant colours. It was much the best part of the altarpiece, and its fame spread far and wide, so that his reputation was established and he was known ever after as the Master of the Angels. But he never married Gianetta, for the poor girl was now incurably insane, and was never again able to leave the shelter of her convent. Most of the time she was quiet, but occasionally she would escape the vigilance of the nuns, and then she would climb the tower of the campanile, and would be found there, wildly invoking the heavens with tears in her eyes.
"Fly!" she would call, "Oh, fly! Please, fly!"

The Library Van: a true story

Between leaving school and going to university, I worked for six months at the Cumberland County Library. One of the tasks there was to go round remote parts of the county on the travelling library van. For some of the tiny villages and remote farmhouses, seeing us every three weeks was one of  their few contacts with the outside world.
               One woman had an invariable procedure. “I want 5 murders, 3 romances and a western”, she would say, and leave us to choose them for her. She would then cast her eye over our selection, discarding a few because “they didn’t look very good“, or because she thought she might have read them before. Other customers had their own systems for dealing with the latter problem; such as making a pencil mark on a certain page once they’d read one of our books. In cold weather some kind ladies would bring us mugs of tea, though since they invariably stirred in large quantities of sugar, I could never drink mine.
She wasn’t the only customer who let us choose her books, and some of the choices we made must have caused some surprise. Harold the van driver once persuaded a lady at a remote farm to take home James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. “Is it a good book?” she asked. “It’s a very famous book”, said Harold. “I want something I can read in bed”, she said. “It’s probably best if you read this in bed”, Harold told her. I never found out what she made of it, since I don’t recall we ever saw her again.

Harold explained to me the perils of engaging these people in conversation. They probably never saw anyone except us and the postman for weeks at a time, and they were often desperate for a talk, but we had a tight schedule to keep, and if we let them stay on the van for too long, we’d never get round in time. Harold’s policy was to agree with everything they said. “You can’t have a proper conversation with someone who always agrees with you”, he said. I witnessed this technique in action at an isolated farmhouse up near Kershopefoot on the Scottish border; the home of an artist who was in fact a Nazi. He clambered onto the van in his paint-stained overalls. “Things is bad!” he told us, “There’s Jews in high places bleeding this country white!” “You’re right there!” said Harold. The man soon went away. But I’m afraid I forgot Harold’s advice on one occasion, when once an old farm labourer got on the van and told us, with no introduction, that all farm land should be nationalised. “You’ll be a socialist then”, I dutifully said. Oh no, he always voted Conservative. I couldn’t retrain myself from asking why, and he told me this long story about how, when he was a boy on the Earl of Lonsdale’s estate back before the First World War, he once opened a gate for the Earl’s carriage to come through, and there sitting beside the Earl was the Kaiser, who had come to spend Christmas up at the castle. The Earl had given him half-a-sovereign and said, “You look a promising young chap. If you ever want a job, come up to the hall and see me“. But then he’d gone off to the trenches, and it was only in the 1920s that he’d met the earl at a county show and the earl had said to him, “I recognise you! You’re the lad who opened the gate for me back before the war! Why didn’t you come up to the hall and take the job I offered you?” And ever since then he’d voted Conservative. Politics is a bit primitive up on the Border. I’ve often reflected that my vote could be cancelled out by someone like that.

What Remains

Judging by the family portraits they left us, they must have been well-off. The husband and wife are depicted side-by-side, wearing their best clothes. He chose to be painted holding an official-looking document with a red seal attached, suggesting something legal. His wife, more informally, is shown sucking the end of a pencil, with a quizzical expression on her face, as if she was wondering whether she might have left something off her shopping list. In a separate picture a younger woman, presumably their daughter, is also sucking a pencil and clutching a notebook in her left hand, but her expression more resembles a poet searching for the next line.
    They would have been proud of their home, with its brightly-painted walls. They had a dog, and like many home-owners since, they had put up a sign warning intruders that their dog was very fierce. They would especially have loved their neat little garden, which had a few statues amongst the flowers, and we can imagine them enjoying a drink of wine there with their friends in a summer evening. Their surviving pictures show they had good taste, and maybe they regarded the somewhat explicit artworks favoured by their neighbours as a bit vulgar. Our family preferred pictures of birds and plants. One particularly delightful painting shows a young girl gathering spring flowers, so realistic that you can see the blossom falling around her.
     But it was not blossom which fell on our family on that terrible day many years ago: it was something far more deadly. And they are gone, so we are no longer certain even of their names, but their home and their pictures still survive; pictures in which the blossom never did fall, but is frozen forever in an eternal spring.      

Note:-

I wrote this after visiting the magnificent Pompeii exhibition at the British Museum last week. I have, of course, included items which would have been found in many different houses at Pompeii as if they all came from the same house; but that is how they were set out in the exhibition. 

The Last Morning

And now the thunder ends. The eager sun
Strikes diamonds in the glistening July fields.
Larks rise into the blue. The very soil is glad.
The waiting-time is almost at an end.
It was for this
We gathered, left behind the wretched life
Of comfortable homes and mindless games
Endured exhaustion, and the curses, and the pain,
Drenched by the storms upon the open heath,
Blistered our feet along the cobbled roads
Of France, bearing enormous loads;
But we were fiercely glad.
It was for this.
The rolling hills rise eastwards to the sun;
There we shall go today.
Now all is tense
We stand, anticipating the release
The waiting time is almost at an end……
At last the whistles blow, the moment’s come
And morning light is playing on the Somme.

(July 1st, 1916)

Unprepared: a dream

I had spent the morning working on a cupboard-full of someone else’s junk, extracting the few items that were worth saving and putting aside the remained to be thrown out, and then I met Kom. He must have spotted how bored I looked, and he asked me if I was yet ready to be initiated. He had mentioned this before, and this time I said yes.
Initiated into what, you might ask. Here Kom would employ a word which he said was untranslatable: somewhere between a religious faith and a view of life. I took it to mean some exotic form of Buddhism, or something on those lines. I didn’t inquire; but I certainly wasn’t prepared for what followed. Kom led me into the older part of town and through a nondescript door to a courtyard beyond. On the opposite side was an open doorway, which was evidently where I should go. A couple of other people were waiting there already: they did not turn to look at me. Kom said that etiquette required that I should wait for the person ahead to disappear out of sight before I entered. I asked Kom if someone would instruct me what to do, and he said yes, of course.
While I waited a watched an old man in the courtyard who was going through a dance, involving many singular jumps and hops. His bare legs looked wiry and strong, and he moved as lightly as any gymnast or ballet-dancer, He looked totally self-absorbed and took  no notice of anyone else. It seemed plain that he was an adept. After a while the way ahead of me was clear.

Inside the doorway there was a metal ladder leading upwards. I climbed it. The climb took a long time, and was partly in darkness, but at last I emerged into daylight.  
I was high above the town, standing on a platform of glistening white quartz. It looked like a natural formation, though it was not much wider than the top of a column, and the sides were almost as steep. I did not like this at all. I once went rock-climbing with a friend, and felt most uncomfortable on the exposed heights. I sat down, hoping it would be safer. Then the instructions came:
“Conquer your fear. Look down on the city bone-yard and do not be afraid” One of the oddest things is that I can’t remember whether these words were written down, or spoken, or just popped into my head. I looked. There was a city below me, but it did not resemble the town I had come from. In was totally silent, and I could not see a single human being anywhere. Beyond the city there was countryside and further off, faint through the haze, a range of mountains. It was not scenery I recognised. Then I looked to see what to do next. There was a sort of path down, but it looked very slippery and dangerous, without anything to hold onto. More instructions came:
“Why the need to hurry? You can stay here for ever if you wish”

I cannot for the life of me say how I did get down: I have no memory of it whatsoever. I wonder if I fainted. But I certainly didn’t fall, or I wouldn’t be here today. Am I, perhaps, in a sense, still up there on that high and perilous seat? I tried discussing this with Kom, but he cut me short, saying that everyone’s experience was different and it was best not to talk about the subject: he would take me to the next stage when the time was right. What his own initiation involved he refused to say.

Abroad Thoughts From Home

(with apologies to Robert Browning)

Oh, to be out of England
Now that April's here!
For whoever wakes in England
Finds, each morning, as he feared,
That the east wind's blowing with might and main
And the garden pond is frozen again
And the snow disfigures the hedgerow's brow
In England, now.

The Old Bus: a true story

When I was teaching at the High School, someone in authority decided that, rather than always having to shell out money to Bassett’s Coaches for our outings, it would make sense to buy our own transport; and so we obtained The Bus. It was a truly awe-inspiring motor; the year’s latest model - the year in question being somewhere round about 1948. Truly it would have graced any museum of the history of transport; but this did not make it any easier to drive. There was no power-assisted steering, and no synchromesh on any of the gears, which quickly led to one of the geography teachers acquiring the nickname of “Captain Crunch” for his efforts behind the wheel. Max, my head of department, who was a keen motorist, described changing gear as like stirring a cricket stump in a bucket of marbles. He was a little chap, and sometimes he had to employ both hands wrestling with it. “Christ!! Bloody hell!!” he would exclaim as he did battle with the gears amidst heavy traffic in the middle of Stoke. Once, when he was having a particularly bad time on the way back from a trip to the Gladstone pottery, one boy foolishly made some sarcastic comment on his driving. “If you think you can do any better, then come and have a go!” snarled Max, still sweating in his attempts to find third gear. The boy was rash enough to answer, “Okay then!” Max was so enraged that he stopped the bus and charged up the central aisle, with every intention of thumping the wretched youth, but before the blow could land, the handbrake started to slip and Max had to race back to the controls. And by the time we arrived back at the school, Max was far too occupied with the tricky problem of parking the bus (which could only be done in reverse, after first edging the bonnet up the drive of the house opposite, at the risk of doing irreparable damage to the flowering cherry) to take any further action.
The worst journey I experienced came near the end of the one summer term, when we took the first formers on the annual history trip into Shropshire. The first stop was Ludlow, which we reached without mishap; but when we stopped at the entrance to the castle, we were approached by a policeman. “You can’t park here”, he told us, “You’ll have to go to the coach park”. Mark, who was driving, pleaded with him: we’d come a long way and we shouldn’t be there for more than an hour. The policeman eyed the bus narrowly. “I wouldn’t like to have to give a full roadworthiness check to this vehicle, sir”, he said meaningfully. We went to the coach park. The stop for lunch at Stokesay castle passed without mishap, although Nick, our youngest teacher, had with typical disorganisation forgotten to bring any sandwiches, and was reduced to begging for contributions from the pupils (fortunately one boy had been provided by his mother with no fewer than nine chicken legs, and was able to come to the rescue). But then there was an untoward incident in the grounds of Buildwas Abbey, when one of the boys had his shoe subjected to a sexual assault by a randy little puppy. “Sir, it’s weed on me!” he said, inaccurately. The crowning moment of the day came as we drove back through Hodnet. One of the boys complained that he felt sick. We were travelling along narrow, twisty roads unsuitable for stopping, and we were in any case late, so I passed him a plastic waste-bucket already half full of bent coke tines and screwed-up crisp bags. He chundered voluminously into this receptacle, and then a little later approached me again, in some distress. “Sir“, he said, “the brace from my teeth fell in!” I said that if he thought I was going to start fishing for it, he was mistaken. “But the dentist’ll be mad at me sir!” he moaned. When we finally arrived back at school, I made him and another boy who had annoyed me empty the bucket into one of the vast grunions by the gate. During the course of this operation, I observed they both contrived to get it all over their jackets, but I decided I had done quite enough for the day, and went home.
The old bus was still there when I left the school, and I never found out what happened to it. Presumably it has long since left this life for that great multi-storey carpark in the sky - assuming, of course that it was permitted to enter.