Lovers long ago

You’ve decided to fly south; you’ve decided to go and see Andalucía in the sun. Your flight arrives at Malaga, the town where both Picasso and Antonia Banderas were born. From there you drive west on the road to Gibraltar. And what do you see? Why, mile after mile of costal development, apartment blocks without interruption, developments completed and developments abandoned for lack of cash. Welcome to the Costa del Sol, possibly the least romantic place on the face of the earth.

Some parts admittedly are worse than others. Torremolinos is not my idea of hell; Torremolinos is hell. But one thing is sure – Laurie Lee would never recognise the coast he once walked along on his distant Spanish adventure; it’s gone. Still, do not despair. The damage is bad but it’s fairly superficial. Turn inland and one can indeed find something of the old Andalucía, of the ancient kingdom of Al-Andalus, from the Alhambra in Granada to the Mezquita of Cordoba.

But it’s another place I want to write about, a place that I assume most people stuck on the coast will ever have heard of. It’s Antequera, the city of the mountains that lies to north of Granada. From the Alcazba, the Moorish castle at the highest point of the town, I looked out La Pena de los Enamorados – Lover’s Rock – a great sphinx-like face if viewed from a side angle, an Indian lying on his back. It gets its name from a romantic, Romeo-and-Juliet-style legend going back to the days when Andalucía was still under the control of the Moors

The story is that a Christian from Antequera fell in love with a Muslim girl from nearby Archidona. Leaving together, they were pursued by Moorish soldiers. To evade them the lovers took refuge on the limestone crag, standing almost nine hundred meters above sea level. Rather than surrender they leapt from there to their deaths. The story was later adapted by the poet Robert Southey in Lalia and Manuel. True or not I really don’t care; the story appeals to my romantic sensibilities. I looked on that great face with a sense of loss, a sense of old, unhappy, far-off things, and lovers long ago.

Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Saying no to ‘Reform’

To begin with I should make my own position clear: I’m totally opposed to any kind of electoral ‘reform.’ To be more exact, I’m opposed to the proposals to change the way we elect members of Parliament in England from our present ‘first past the post’ method to some form of proportional representation.

The first past the post system is clear and simple, one that has served us reasonably well over the years, enabling strong governments to emerge with a definite mandate. For those who may not be familiar with how it works, those who live in countries that do have a system of proportional representation, for electoral purposes Britain is divided into a number of Parliamentary constituencies. In electoral contests the person who takes a majority of votes is the winner, no matter if the vote she or he attracts is less than that of all of the others combined. Although we have slightly lost the point in modern politics, people are voting for an individual, not a party, and that individual maintains a close relationship with the local constituency, representing all of the people, not just those who voted for her or him.

It’s unfair, the opponents say. It favours the ruling party, which can command an absolute majority in Parliament though it may not have a commanding lead in the total number of votes cast across the country. It’s an argument put most forcefully in England by the Liberal Democrats, who consistently come second or third in most of the constituency contests but still attract a reasonably high percentage of the national vote when all of the constituency results are combined.

In the wake of our recent Parliamentary election all sorts of specious arguments have been put forward, arguments assuming a consensus on our supposedly ‘broken politics.’ First past the post is outmoded, the cry goes up, the era of two party politics is over. There is no doubt at all in my mind that this is all so much tosh.

Minority or coalition government is unusual in this country but we have been here in the past and I dare say we will be back here in the future. Our politics are by no means ‘broken’ simply because the Liberal Democrats think it unfair that they don’t have enough seats, or the United Kingdom Independence Party or the British National Party think it unfair because they have no seats at all, although they do in the European Parliament, that toy town assembly which does operate a system of proportional representation.

There is a very good piece in the recent issue of Standpoint by William Norton on the whole question of voting ‘reform’ (Out of proportion.) The essential point that he makes is that to say first past the post is “unfair” because Party A, receiving x per cent of the national vote, does not receive x per cent of MPs already presupposes that “fairness” is the same as proportional representation. But rival electoral systems represent rival and alternative definitions of fairness.

He gives the example of Dr Richard Taylor, who in the general elections of 2001 and 2005 was elected Member of Parliament for Wyre Forest as in independent heading a campaign to save Kidderminster Hospital. Enough people in the constituency felt strongly enough about this to overturn party loyalties and the established political machine. In other words, he was elected by local people voting for a local candidate on the basis of a local issue. But people across the nation, people who do not live in Wyre Forest, clearly have no interest whatsoever in Kidderminster Hospital. So, in the great pool of proportional representation, Dr Taylor’s vote would have been infinitesimal. He would never have been elected, which, as Norton rightly says, would have been savagely unfair to the people of Wyre Forest. They would have been drowned in a sea of ‘fairness.’

Proportional representation, you see, is fair to parties, not people. It means that the electorate would forever be fodder for party machines. It means that, since coalition is inevitable because no party would ever achieve an absolute majority of the votes cast, manifestos would be either fraudulent, in that the programme could not be implemented in its entirety, or that they would serve as the opening gambit in the inevitable post-election horse trading. Politicians who talk about our ‘broken’ politics or our ‘outmoded’ electoral system (so outmoded that it’s used by some sixty countries) are peddling a message of hypocritical self-interest. They care more about themselves and their sectional advantage than they do about real fairness.

The Dream and Lie of Picasso

There is one certain truth about Pablo Picasso: he was first, second and last an egoist. But he was a great man of principle, the objection comes, a communist, a lover of freedom, a hater of fascism. After all, this was a man who depicted the horrors of Nationalist Spain in such works as The Dream and Lie of Franco. Alas, it has now come to light that he was actively involved in negotiations with representatives of that same regime in the 1950s with a view to having a retrospective exhibition of his work mounted in Madrid!

If such an exhibition had been held it would have been a major coup for the Falangists, destroying Picasso’s sainted reputation among the left. The Spanish foreign ministry agreed that the talks should go ahead, but on the grounds of absolute secrecy. When details were leaked to the press the whole project was simply abandoned, while official denials were released. But they were sufficiently far advanced for members of Picasso’s circle to write pleading that he should resist the temptation, according to a note left by Jean Cocteau in his diary.

These details are set to be released by John Richardson and Gijs van Hensbergen, working on the fourth volume of Picasso’s biography. Seemingly his views on politics, like so many other things, were a lot more subtle that usually assumed. He apparently told Cocteau of the communists that “I have joined a family, and like all families, it’s full of shit.”

The fact is that his love of Spain, his desire for an exhibition there, was greater than his love of the Communist Party. But greatest of all was his love for himself. Less full of shit, I feel sure, than communism.

Least We Forget

It’s now seventy years since the successful conclusion of Operation Dynamo, during which thousands of Allied troops, trapped in and around the French port of Dunkirk by the advancing German army, were rescued and brought back to England. The effort of the ‘little ships’, the pleasure boats and private vessels which played such a vital part in saving so many, has entered into folk memory. A story about some of these boats returning to France was shown on the BBC News recently.

It’s as well to remember, though, that there was another dimension to the success of Operation Dynamo that is not perhaps mentioned quite as often as it should be – namely the selfless courage of the men who were left behind, the rearguard that slowed the German advance on Dunkirk.

Last month The Daily Telegraph told the story of Private Bert Evans, the only living survivor of the Wormhoudt Massacre. On 26 May Private Evans, serving with what was left of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, took up position in the village of Wormhoudt. His company was joined by units of the Cheshire Regiment and the Royal Artillery. Their orders were simple: they were there to buy time.

This was no idle sacrifice; for every hour the German advance was delayed the more men could be lifted from the beaches. Under assault from advance units of SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Panzer Division, they managed to hold out for two crucial days, only surrendering after they ran out of ammunition.

No sooner had they been taken prisoner than a number were machine-gunned in the village square. The rest were crowded into a tiny nearby barn, a hundred men in all, and killed by a combination of stick grenades and machine-gun fire. The few badly-wounded survivors, Private Evans included, were later picked up and cared for by units of the regular German army.

At the south-west end of the Dunkirk perimeter the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolks, along with the 8th Lancashire Fusiliers, had been ordered to hold the line at the villages of Le Cornet Malo, Riez du Vinage and Le Paradis for as long as possible. Leading the attack the SS Totenkopf Division suffered serious casualties. The Norfolks, cut off in and around a farmhouse at Le Paradise, were reduced to ninety-nine men. On 27 May, now running out of ammunition, they were ordered to surrender by their commanding officer. The captives, the majority of whom were wounded, were marched down a road off the Rue du Paradis to a prepared position where they were machine-gunned. The survivors were bayoneted. Two men survived the carnage, rescued by French civilians.

When Private Evans was interviewed by The Telegraph he said of himself and his comrades that he thanked God that they did their duty. They all did their duty, the Warwicks, the Cheshires, the Norfolks, the Royal Artillery and all of the others, all played a part in ensuring that their comrades would live to fight again. They, too, are worth remembering.

England’s First Lesbian

I freely confess that I know next to nothing about lesbian history though in terms of sexual preferences I’ve defined myself as bi ever since I was at school. The thing is I don’t really have an awful lot of interest in what I call ‘niche’ history, the history of shared identities or lifestyles, if I can put it like that. Not so long ago I tried to read Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. I gave it up because it bored me rigid!

But thanks to BBC 2 I know something of the life Anne Lister, a remarkable woman, a landowner, a scholar, a free-spirit and a lesbian, open joyful and uninhibited. Born in 1791, Anne lived and loved in Shibden Hall near Halifax in West Yorkshire, a property she inherited from her uncle in 1826. She kept a journal in which her most intimate encounters were recorded in a code of her own devising, mixing Greek letters and algebraic symbols. Amazingly they were not fully deciphered until the late twentieth and even then were considered at first to be a hoax because the details of the author’s seductions were considered to be too graphic for the time!

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, starring Maxine Peak in the title role, was broadcast on Monday evening. I had not long returned from a weekend away and was feeling quite tired but I was immediately captivated both by the story and by Peak’s performance. It was followed afterwards by a documentary on Anne’s life. Peak has said of this;

She was an extraordinary woman who, up to recently, has only really been documented in lesbian history. Hopefully, with this film and documentary, she will reach a wider audience exposing them to this inspirational and formidable woman. I am honoured but petrified to be embarking on the role of such a pioneering lady!

Anne was a contemporary of Jane Austen’s, but, my, it would not be possible to imagine two more different people, two more different writers. Both in their own ways were challenging the conventions of the day, Jane simply by being a writer at all. But while she depicted relationships of an entirely conventional and stiffly fastidious nature, Anne was giving free flow to thoughts and actions that not even a tolerant and understanding chap like Mr Knightly would have approved and understood!

Anne lived at a time when polite society would not have admitted lesbianism as a practice, let alone tolerate its existence. Still her sexual preferences were widely know, hinted at in the name of Gentleman Jack, given to her in some quarters. She seems to have been a singular-looking individual, one of mannish appearance, and certainly one of mannish tastes. At one point she recorded in her journal;

Yet my manners are certainly peculiar, not all masculine but rather softly gentleman-like. I know how to please girls.

Of that I have not the least doubt!

Anne was eventually to ‘marry’ Ann Walker, another wealthy heiress, whom she met in 1832. The two travelled to Europe together where Anne acquired an additional reputation, that of a mountaineer. Anne died, of all places, in Kutasi in Georgia while travelling with her wife. How unusual it is for me to write that – ‘her wife’-, it just seems such an odd conjunction of words! Ann Walker was devoted enough to her ‘husband’ to bring her body back to England for burial. I love pioneers of all kinds. I’m so delighted to have discovered the life of this extraordinary woman.

Ana Whose Eyes Are Burning

Thanks to Adam. :-)

Ana’s eyes are burning,
As they shine from beyond the black,
The hearts of men are churning,
As candles burn out all they lack.

They gaze out at the city,
They gaze on all who dare,
They have no place for pity,
And feign not unaware.

There is a bridge that bears much crying,
Like the weeping of a wisp,
A will undiluted and undying,
The burn that’s sharp and crisp.

The hedgerow is now wilting,
The trees will dance and sway,
The parallels are tilting,
And the ships are washed away.

Her melancholy moment’s answer,
Her days are never short,
The twilight angel’s dancer,
The devil’s lust for sport.

Her eyes are truly fire,
That melt a deep dark sea,
The ashes of desire,
Shall tumble far to thee.

Her tongue is but the softest sword,
Too sharp to hear the battle’s run,
When guilty of its own accord,
And thus shall never set this holy sun.

Oh eyes, what eyes that greet the child,
Born in sin and rendered wild,
Casting fragments of a page,
That struts its way cross gilded stage.

Ana’s eyes eternal,
And now they beckon all who seek,
The path from the infernal,
The road too clear for names to speak.

Ana is the fire—Ana is the rain,
Ana is the destiny that carves pleasure from pain.

The rain is washed by morning,
A dawn of deepest blue,
All that’s born of fire—is all in this world that’s true.

I shall always be near you

There is a letter that seems to me to unite the tragedy of war with feelings of transcendent love. It was not written by a poet, a novelist or a philosopher, but by an ordinary man, a soldier on the eve of battle. His name was Sullivan Ballou, writing in the summer of 1861 to his wife, Sarah. I was in my teens when I heard it recited on a documentary series shown by BBC Television in England about the American Civil War. It's too long to reproduce in its entirety, but here are the parts that moved me the most;

I cannot describe to you my feelings on this calm summer night, when two thousand men are sleeping around me, many of them enjoying the last, perhaps, before that of death--and I, suspicious that Death is creeping behind me with his fatal dart, am communing with God, my country and thee...

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.

The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most grateful to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And hard as it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our sons grow up to honorable manhood around us. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me...that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name...

But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth to flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and in the darkest night --amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours--always, always; and if there is a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

A week after writing this letter Sullivan Ballou was killed at the Battle of Bull Run. The recital on TV chased me off to my bedroom, where I wept buckets!