Monday 25 March 2024

Japan


 So British Empire-centric have my travels been over recent years, a reckoning with another world was required for a corrective to my understanding of global history. For too long have I been accustomed to seeing the world through colonial eyes. I need a shock, I need to be taken down a peg, I need to see some place that never experienced 1066 and All That. When Henry V was on the throne, what was happening here? Answer: it was the Muromachi period in which Japanese society was way ahead of Britain’s - militarily, economically and trade wise. I can recommend Peter Frankopan’s alternative history of the world in his highly readable and educative book, The Silk Roads. In it he puts Britain on the very Western perimeter of cultural, political and military developments fifteen hundred years ago; we were very late into the game. I was brought up with Philip’s School Atlases depicting much of the world’s landmass in pink. Friends who have visited and even worked in Japan helped prepare me for a totally different people and culture. 

Just a brief note on those wonderful people, the Irish. Britain would not be the country it is today without them. Oh begorrah no. Through the second millennium AD of Britain’s development the Irish played a significant role through filling the ranks of our regiments in our global wars, remaining behind to help found new British communities around the empire and establishing a chain of Irish pubs where I can order a pint of Guinness - there’s one next door to our hotel in Kyoto. (Now they are winning all the British literary awards. But we did beat them this year at Twickenham.)

We have only been in Japan for six days and one of the noticeable differences with Britain is the cleanliness of the cities. As we left home last week The Times newspaper carried an article about the shameful quantities of litter on British roads and in the countryside. Another article spoke of a landowner restricting access to his land because visitors have no idea about closing gates, dogs off the lead (let alone leaving bags of poo hanging in trees) and discarding drinks cans. Here in Tokyo and Kyoto the streets are devoid of any trash. 

The courtesy of all Japanese people we have met is humbling. They are unfailingly polite and smiley. In the awesome and scarily huge Tokyo station, where the Shinkansen (bullet trains) speed in to each platform every 6 minutes, there are thousands of citizens rushing past you at all times on the platforms and concourses. You feel you’re going to have a human collision at any moment but, like bats, we swerve to avoid a hit at the last moment. 

As we head out of the big cities into the countryside we realise that Tokyo is very Western in its built environment even if some buildings are icons of Japanese style. Built on the North American grid system the streets in downtown Tokyo are home to the ubiquitous brands we see on the streets of most la Western  cities. A little bit of history tells me that the Americans occupied Tokyo after the firebombing of the city destroyed over eighty per cent of its buildings in WW2. Japan had never been occupied so the arrival of General MacArthur in 1945 was a curiosity to say the least. For various reasons the Japanese economy took off under the guidance of American influence and you can see those influences today. In a week when the US and Japan have signed a new security pact I don’t think this influence will end anytime soon. 

Next weekend we head for Hiroshima. Having been underwhelmed by the movie Oppenheimer, we shall see an open field in the Peace Memorial Park where Oppenheimer’s bomb landed. I expect a much more powerful and cultural experience than that gleaned from the screen. 

Sayonara for now. 




Sunday 9 July 2023

The Sound of Silence: the Isle of Harris


I was drifting going no place.
Hypnotized by sunshine maybe,
barking back at seals along the beach.
Skipping flat stones on the water, 
but much too wise for sand castles.
My castles were across the sea
or still within my mind.
Listen To The Warm – Rod McKuen
Within the anguished debate on human migration one place is largely forgotten. This is a landscape beyond the ken of most Britons south of the Scottish border. This is a land of boulders and rocks, a lot of water and few inhabitants. In winter it is a wild and inhospitable place but in spring it is transformed into an enchanting paradise for those who crave tranquillity. Hidden from view is a turbulent past that is largely missing from the contemporary debate. The Outer Hebrides are a string of islands off the north west coast of Scotland, the last before crossing the Atlantic westwards to Labrador. In more worlds than the physical they sit on the periphery of Britain.

What may be unfamiliar to all but a few travelers today is the eviction of thousands of Hebrideans from their homes by estate owners or their factors with the ‘Highland Clearances’ in the mid-eighteenth century. Tenant farmers and crofters with a tradition of land occupancy behind them were evicted in the name of agricultural development. Some landlords were callous in their disregard for the evicted. Many of these unfortunate souls were shipped off forcibly to Canada and the United States. Why am I not reading about demands for reparation from those Hebrideans’ descendants in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Montana? I have not seen any yet. I wonder now if some of the folk I met when I travelled through these Canadian provinces over fifty years ago were descendants of Hebridean refugees.

“Tyrannical Victorian exploitation”; “rich aristocrats abused the local people”; “inhabitants forced out of their homes” are some of the familiar accusations written as newspaper headlines topping articles on our culture wars surrounding the British Empire.  On my visits I have read about the slave trade in the West Indies, the Raj in India and the treatment of the Aborigines in Australia. Being as I am British, some like to make me feel guilty for the acts of my forefathers in the Empire. The apologists demand reparations. And then I recall from another persecuted race came Golda Meir, a prime minister of Israel, who once said:
“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.”
I believe this to be true and a sentiment worthy of reflection as I write about a small portion of land on the outer edge of Britain. For here in the north west is a complex history peopled by Vikings, the Scottish clans of Macdonald and MacLeod and the Scottish Government (there is nothing unique about the Salmonds and the Sturgeons when they were in office, their predecessors were equally slippery). Worthy Victorian gentry and rapacious industrialists played a part too. We cannot undo their lives. This is the story of the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides.

The clearances did more to shape the socio-economic development of the Hebrides than any other subsequent event. They caused pain and bitterness for families forced off their land who resented unscrupulous landlords for years after. Following the Jacobite uprising in 1745 clan chiefs were denied their own armies. Fewer young men were killed off in battle and family sizes grew. The population in the Outer Hebrides nearly doubled in the years after the rebellion. Crofting was encouraged to attract families onto the land. This was due also partly to the successful introduction of the potato. Yet there were insufficient jobs for everyone and clan chiefs persuaded many local people to emigrate. However, there were some thoughtful landowners who invested in a range of other commercial enterprises that offered employment. Fishing was one activity. The production of soda ash from kelp was another. (Kelp is a versatile resource. I shall mention it again when I describe the current commerce of Harris.) The boom in fishing and kelp was short-lived however. The market for these products declined and landowners contracted their operations. They narrowed their farming activities to keeping sheep which at this time were a lucrative resource. Clearly there was a reduced need for labour. After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815 a new generation of returning soldiers found few employment options. The unlucky ones and their families were evicted. The potato famine in 1846 was the last straw for many who upsticked and left the islands forever.

Noble industrialists and aristocrats who owned the Isle of Harris and other Western Isles of Scotland were the latest of centuries of outsiders to be attracted to this wild and barren landscape. All had ambitions but were frustrated by the land’s unwillingness to yield to their desires.  

In 1844 James Matheson (of Jardine Matheson & Co of Hong Kong, a man who was made wealthy with his partner William Jardine from the trade in Chinese opium – another dubious activity to set modern sensibilities aflutter), was one who bought the Isle of Lewis to the north of Harris. Almost immediately he perpetrated what many would say was an act of cruel and inhumane brutality. He cleared the island of over five hundred families and forced them to emigrate to Canada. He was only one of many landowners in Scotland who aided the eviction of farmers from their land.

In Matheson’s defence it must be said that whilst he owned Lewis he did give employment through building roads, a castle and social projects. He also provided famine relief to his tenants when potato blight caused the staple island crop to fail in 1846/47. Yet his hardheartedness and unwillingness to find alternative employment for other crofters changed the social structure of the islands from then on. At least Catherine Murray the Countess of Dunmore gave financial assistance to those she evicted and paid to emigrate. The countess had inherited a large estate on Harris in 1845 on the death of her husband. She made some attempts to establish some foundations for the threatened community by building a school. She also took an interest in one industry that offered a living for some Hebrideans, that of the production of Harris Tweed.

In 1918 an industrialist named William Hesketh Lever bought the Isle of Lewis for £143,000. In 1919, Baron Leverhulme, as William is better known, bought the Isle of Harris for £36,000. His plan was to start up a herring fishing industry based out of the harbour at Stornoway on Lewis. The local people on Lewis were wary of Leverhulme. Being Gaelic-speaking crofters of an independent mind many Hebrideans were subsistence farmers and it was not in their nature to be herded into organised communities like Leverhulme’s soap makers in Lancashire. For the indigenous crofting community land was not an asset to be bought nor sold but an inheritance a family had the right to pass on from one generation to the next. Some clung on to their way of life and were rewarded later in the century by William Gladstone who brought The Crofters’ Holding Act to their help in getting security of their land.

On Harris, however, Leverhulme’s desire to industrialise some communities had a more favourable reception. The people here possibly had a more worldly view than their cousins on Lewis. After all, the landscape on Harris is a tougher one than that on Lewis. The former’s terrain is largely devoid of cultivable ground save the thin strip of machair on the littoral. Anyone who could promise prosperity from work on the island might be regarded sympathetically, especially as it did not involve the crofters investing their own money.

Harris (its name comes from a Norse word for ‘high land’) is hilly, barren and grey. The landscape is made up of rock, peat bog and heather and is largely treeless. Today ribbons of narrow roads snake around the fringes of the island. The hinterland has a bedrock of impenetrable Lewisian gneiss. I find it ironic that despite Harris lacking any prettiness in its interior landscape one of its principal economy drivers today is based on tourism. Yet what the land lacks in beauty is made up by the western shores. 


As our travelling companion says: “Beaches and yet more glorious beaches.  Losgaintir, Seilebost, Sgarastaigh, Horgabost. They are forever changing, shifting and evolving.  The natural 'artwork' I found this year on the sand at Losgaintir astounded me.  An arrangement of sand and peat particles left by the receding tide, that is all, but the exquisiteness and the brief existence of the result leaves a deep impression.” These expansive beaches are formed of crushed shells giving a glistening whiteness. A visitor to Losgaintir will be rewarded with astounding sights across the beach to the mountains in the north. Undulating layers of pale grey, blues, turquoise, greens and yellows stretch from wide on the left to deep along the estuary to the right. And when we ventured into those mountains in the north, close to Loch Scourst and found a mountain that is home to golden eagles we saw one, solitarily gliding in the glen in search of an evening meal.

Wild places tend not to attract many people. The Vikings raided here around 800 A.D. and some had settled by 850 when a Norse king, Ketill Bjornson, who was descriptively nicknamed Flatnose, ruled the land. In the ensuing years Harris and the Western Isles as in much of Britain came under varying occupying adventurers. I am once again reminded of modern-day Britons who protest at immigration in the twenty-first century and who choose to ignore that our culture, our history and our influencers have always come from overseas. 

For all its isolation on the periphery of Britain Harris has had a past full of distinctive people. 
Brawny clans of Macdonalds, MacNeils and MacLeods lived and fought for supremacy here. Charles Edward Stuart, otherwise known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, escaped from Skye to Harris in 1746. Large estates including that of the Countess Dunmore boosted the Harris Tweed business. 

Our travelling companions know these islands well. They have often talked about them with a fondness that I could not fathom from their descriptions. Barra, South Uist and Harris clearly hold a power of them and others who return each year in springtime. This power that the Isle of Harris has over its visitors is what interests me. My travels through many landscapes usually reveal a tight bond that people build with their land. Some may have an attraction to a climate or a particular terrain that rewards them with abundant harvest of food or wine. Then there are the landscapes that do all they can to break human souls and a will to survive yet the people stay on. They remain for the oldest and best of reasons; because it is home. 

On the surface Harris today offers few opportunities for commerce and therefore few employment opportunities for the local population. Agriculture provides lean pickings. There is little industry to provide work for young people. Shops and schools are thin on the ground. Theatres and sports stadiums are absent. There is some flora and fauna but little to attract international birders, botanists and zoologists. (There is the ubiquitous ground-dwelling cuckoo, one with an extended family near our lodge. Their daily quadrophonic repertoire of song around the lochs and rocks echoed through the silence.) Seals and otters like this place yet this does not make it unique.  To be fair to the place there is that golden eagle and the machair.

Yet during our time on the island, we encountered an assortment of visitors from Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and France. They all bring a most valuable and essential commodity: cash. Harris is a long way from Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin and Paris. It is even a long way from London and Glasgow. I started to wonder why the Belgians, Dutch, Germans and French come here. Many are loners, looking for solitude as they motor or cycle around the narrow roads. It seems to me that these Europeans from the mainland see Brexit from a different perspective from us islanders. I for one thought Brexit would be a terrible mistake and I believe it has been so far. It could be that these mainlanders visiting Harris don’t like their version of ‘Europe’ either and they come to the Outer Hebrides to experience a wilderness untrammelled by contemporary ways of living. So that is why they come; to leave behind and blot out the insanities and the inanities of their twenty first century European lives. 

Life is lived slowly here. As our companion says of her love for the Outer Hebrides, “There doesn't seem to be much point in hurrying, somehow - simply allowing plenty of time to get anywhere or do anything is a better way to be.  The roads cannot be negotiated safely at speed, so speed is out.  I feel a better person for accepting this.”

Also, a good person when in another’s country can meet with the locals and understand their land, their culture and their perspectives. In the bars and cafés there are Americans too. What do they come for? Some have visited, returned and stayed because they are captivated by the peaceful lifestyle that can be attained easily in this place; they buy a bothy and hang out in the quietude. One even founded a new whisky distillery.

After a day or two on the island I became more aware of the two commercial enterprises that may well lead Harris into a stable future; Harris Tweed and whisky. Sheep are an undervalued animal in Britain today. (This summer some sheep farmers are driven to desperation by low prices and are burning their flock’s fleeces because the cost of getting them to market is higher than the £0.40 per kilogram of wool offered to them). As more Britons shun the eating of red meat, they are matched in numbers by those buying their clothes from Vietnam and China, despite the high environmental cost of importing these products. I have some sympathy with climate change protesters and in particular the Just Stop Oil pressure group but if they changed the emphasis of their protest to lowering our food import carbon footprint, I believe they would attract more followers. The once common-place woollen jumper past generations grew up valuing is now, for many, replaced by Lycra. Harris Tweed uses wool produced in the Outer Hebrides. The industry that has built up uses cloth handwoven by local people who also dye and spin the wool. Keen interest shown by the Countess of Dunmore has been followed by the cloth becoming fashionable again in the present century. Leading fashion brands in London, New York and even South Korea are marketing Harris Tweed as a trendy, and to use the overworked word ‘sustainable’, material. This is good news as I support the production of British clothing made from natural materials and even better news for the Hebrideans. The future of this industry looks bright.

The Scotch whisky industry has been through many of degrees of popularity. In the late twentieth century a number of distilleries were closed or mothballed. Some were bought by conglomerates, some by Japanese companies and some just faded away. An enterprising American musician, Anderson Bakewell, discovered the Isle of Harris one day, and like some before him, fell for the island’s charms.  To quote the distillery’s website, “he believed that the rare and elusive spirit of this island could be captured in a bottle and shared with the world”. The ‘Hearach’ will be the first single malt whisky that the distillery produces and is released in September 2023. Local people work in the creative process in Tarbert on Harris. As with all new whisky distilleries it is some years after the processes are started before they can sell the proper thing. Like other founders of new distilleries before them the team at Tarbert immediately started to make and distribute Harris gin. Needing little resting time after distillation it has quickly become popular. Sugar Kelp has found an updated use after the previous industrial use fell away; local kelp gathered from the sea lochs around Harris is used as a botanical ingredient.

So wool and whisky are leading the Isle of Harris out of the post-covid economic doldrums. They provide employment for a growing number of Hebrideans, bring more foreigners to savor their benefits which will in turn underpin the tourist business. I just hope the government are not tempted to widen the roads. (There is little risk of this as the government cannot even fund and provide a modern ferry service between the islands which the locals depend on.)

On Harris there are no reminders of our culture wars, the Russian war and inadequate and self-serving politicians in Edinburgh and Westminster. There are no neon signs nor advertising hoardings nor graffiti. What there is has a plentiful supply; the sound of silence. Our spring days were calm. The sea loch in front of our lodge provides a playground for over thirty grey seals. They frolic and tumble noiselessly in the water then flop onto the rocks to demonstrate that idling in the morning sun is highly recommended. 
The quiet of the land is matched by the quiet on the beaches. There is not a sound from some women walking wolfhounds, beachcombers collecting and bathers shivering. Once you leave the beaches you then discover the machair. Confined to some Atlantic coasts of Ireland and Scotland the machair is a narrow strip of land behind the beaches, underlaid with crushed shells and overlaid with a thin covering of peaty soil. Wild flowers abound providing a palette of colours to please the artist, walker and photographer. It is ironic however that in our lodge the coffee-table book of photographs by a local photographer was entirely made up of monochrome images. For me it is forgivable to see this landscape in black and white. 

Come the autumn and winter months, gales and storms crash across the rocks and the heather, whipping up the sea and driving salt-laden rain into every crevice. A house has to withstand ferocious weather. Gardens are annihilated. That is why Harris is largely treeless. If you love trees and hedgerows – as I do for all their rich textures of varying shades of green and visual beauty; if you love to explore castles, country houses and gardens – you will need to find another place as you will not find them here. There is, however, one vital commodity of life the human mind does need and it is in short supply in many places and for much of the population. There is an abundance of it on Harris. In springtime and in summer it is all around. That sound of silence. No wind, no rain and no traffic. No trains nor planes. No noise and no crowds. There is an absence of all those features that blunt our senses regularly.

The poet and musician Rod McKuen wrote in the nineteen sixties of “love, loneliness and the alienation of our present era”. Back then he sang about the human need for contact. Contact not just with other minds but with sensual experiences found in nature and wilderness. I believe that it is easy to feel a sense of alienation today not just in the cities but also as we rush more and more into a human designed catastrophe within the natural world. I retain my optimism by enveloping myself within my castles of home, family, music, books and green countryside.

This land of Harris gives little else but peace.  I am with Rod, my castles will remain across the sea. 






Monday 16 May 2022

Mary Clarke: a certain life

If you are lucky your life will be now and then be enriched by its inclusion of a newcomer who will charm you, humble you and make you smile. This person will remind you there are good people around and, without achieving fame (a questionable label these days), they excel. The central theme of all my blogs is the part a landscape plays in shaping human lives and its counterpoint - how people shape a landscape in which they live. This piece is about a remarkable woman who left her mark on five distinct landscapes and their communities. Born in Bristol she moved steadily further north in England, ending her days in a Yorkshire Dales village.

In 1925, the year Joan Mary Ready was born, the people of Europe were in a state of apprehension. Does this seem familiar? In January Joseph Stalin ousted Leon Trotsky from leadership of the Soviet Communist party. The next month Adolf Hitler spoke at a mass meeting in Munich of his re-launched Nazi party. Four months later he published Mein Kampf in which he called upon the German people to join his party. In October the German Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, met leaders from Great Britain, France, Italy and Belgium in Switzerland where they signed a security agreement. Stresemann also affirmed Germany’s undertaking not to go to war with France. The same month two British Communists were charged with offences under the 1797 Incitement to Mutiny Act. On 16th November Richard and Dorothy Ready of Bristol had a daughter who they named Mary. 

Seven years after the Armistice brought the First World War to a close, the society into which Mary was born was finding a way forward despite the machinations of politicians across the English Channel. The Art Deco style became established in Paris. England’s men cricketers finally won a Test Match in Australia, the first for thirteen years. Women installed electric washing machines in their homes. The Charleston, a scandalising dance imported from the United States, was becoming all the rage in Britain. Four days after Mary’s birth there was another significant birth, that of Robert Kennedy, a future Attorney-General of the United States.

I first met Mary in 2011 shortly after she moved into the same village where I live in North Yorkshire. In the ten years that I knew her I became drawn into her world, like everyone else who called her a friend. On first meeting her everyone was attracted to a forthright and crisply spoken woman and we all became part of her universe, with Mary quite definitely at the centre. I learned that the seedbed of her determined character was sown in that uncertain post-war period. It was as if from the start she would have her say in how life was to be reorganised out of the social, economic and political chaos of her parents’ youth.

From her diaries, personal memos and the recollections of her two daughters and her Yorkshire friends I discovered a life that was enhanced by a talent for grasping opportunities, fostering friendships and developing her values. She withstood tragedy, hardship and upheaval which led her to be a resolute and brave hearted person. Brought up in age when young people learned to be self-reliant, she used her common sense. For the rest of her life she expected other people to do likewise. This is a brief account of a very certain life.

Mary’s father, Richard Allen Lloyd Ready, was born in Dallas Texas in 1885. His parents were English and he was educated at Gresham’s School in Norfolk and Ardingly in Sussex. Richard worked for most of his life in Bristol where he was a customs officer. It was here he met his future wife, Dorothy Cook, a Yorkshire lass from Bridlington. The Ready family had already grown when Mary’s elder brother Colin was born. By the time the Second World War started Mary was fourteen, living with her family in the village of Backwell west of Bristol and attending Clifton High School in the city. 

Backwell is now in Somerset and three miles north of what has become Bristol Airport. In 1939 the airport was a RAF airfield. Backwell Hill housed an anti-aircraft battery where soldiers helped to protect both the airfield and the city from German bombing raids. Mary remembered a village canteen that was started by residents to cater for the soldiers and airmen. She recalled: “They would come to the canteen for the evening, get hot drinks and sandwiches, play darts, sing around the piano, play billiards and draughts. One soldier from Sunderland with a very broad accent asked me to help him write letters to his wife as he had not learned to read and write. I remember the letters always started ‘Dear, darling Vera…’ I hope he lived through the war and went home to his Vera.”

At the age of fourteen Mary was helping with evacuees from London. They arrived in Backwell in the autumn of 1939. Some were from a secondary school in Hammersmith and came with their teachers. Some were from a Borstal – now known as a Young Offenders Institution – and they came with their warders. 
“As a Girl Guide,” Mary wrote, “I was told to put on my Guide uniform and go to the parish hall. Along with other Guides and adult helpers we served the evacuees with cups of tea and buns, and then helped them with taking them to their billets – the families who were to look after them. I think the Borstal boys all went to a big country house but I don’t remember them doing anything worse than weeing in the street.”

When Mary was about sixteen she became a part-time air raid warden. When the city received a warning of a raid voluntary wardens like Mary would be sent a message with an instruction to ride around on their bikes wearing a tin hat and blowing a whistle. In her typical insouciant and understated way, she wrote “This was quite important as sometimes planes would be fighting overhead and stray bombs were dropped in the countryside – one killed a pony.” A member of Mary’s family recounted a story to me of another incident in Mary’s life at this time. Somerset is the centre of the Scrumpy making industry. (For those unfamiliar with Scrumpy it is a rough form of cider made from a wide selection of apples including fallen fruit from off the ground. The resultant brew is usually cloudy, unrefined and extremely intoxicating.) In the Backwell canteen Scrumpy was sometimes available. Some visiting American GIs were encouraged by Mary to try this local drink. As with most outsiders then and since, including my South African brother-in-law, bravado overtook the GIs who found themselves bested by Mary in Scrumpy drinking contests. After a pint of the concoction the visitors were finished.

It should be remembered that from 1939 male farmworkers were called up into the armed forces and food became in short supply. Young children were asked to help with potato harvesting, fruit picking and tending vegetable crops. Mary and her school friends picked apples at the Long Ashton research station and also helped with the corn harvest in Wiltshire where they were housed at Marlborough College and would sleep on camp beds in the gymnasium.

It was at Clifton High School that Mary studied the life and writings of E.M. Forster – a writer I also studied at school. He was to become a lifelong interest of hers as he is to me. She always had a complete set of Forster’s novels and writings at hand – as I do. She was comfortable with the knowledge that he was homosexual (still a crime at this time) as her liberal views came to the fore. It was probably unusual for an all-girls’ school in the early 1940s to promote and facilitate a discussion of homosexuality – I don’t recall even having that discussion in my school in 1965, we just studied the other themes of Howard’s End. (I had a later brush with Forster’s life and books when I discovered in 1972 that my in-laws holiday house in Crantock had a first edition of Howard’s End signed by the author on 29th October 1910 for Leo Greenwood, a man I have written about elsewhere. I was also delighted to accept from Mary’s daughters a copy of Forster’s biography of his great aunt, Marianne Thornton. This attractive hardback book sits in my Forster collection and acts as an almost daily reminder of Mary.)

Mary left Clifton High School in 1943. She told me that her headmistress was a major influence on her and it was probably due to the head-teacher that Mary went to study economics at the London School of Economics. (This was at a time when women students were a minority and they were not afforded the same opportunities as men.) She completed a BSc in Sociology yet she believed, in her typical forthright way, that she should have been awarded a BA. She really yearned to study English Literature. Throughout her life she read widely and was an enthusiastic contributor to book groups she joined.

For most of the war the LSE was evacuated to the University of Cambridge, a perfect place for a booklover. In 1944 she was starting her second year in Cambridge. In a journal she wrote: “I must have passed the first-year exams, despite life in Cambridge being both busy and great fun. There was certainly hard work to do, including war-work; in my case helping at a Red Cross canteen and night time fire-watching at the Fitzwilliam Museum, wandering around rooms of priceless exhibits watching out for incendiaries. 

“Farm workers and farmers’ sons had been called up and some were presumably fighting their way through Europe after the D-Day landings. So, in the university vacations I joined lots of fellow students at farming camps, doing the work which regular farmworkers, away at the war, did in peacetime. We did get paid for this and got extra food rations. The girls were paid one shilling an hour, the boys one shilling and threepence – very unfair as we worked just as hard as the boys and were much more particular about time-keeping, not nicking the fruit from the orchards and not getting drunk in the pubs.” Not for the first time in her life, and indeed in the lives of her female contemporaries, the unfairness and injustices meted out to their sex were clearly recognised.

Mary’s diary continues with her observations of others around her at this tough time for the country. People older than her and the Cambridge students did lots of different kinds of voluntary work.
“The Local Defence Volunteers - the LDV - became the Home Guard (think of Dad’s Army), and were trained by retired army officers to defend our land if it were invaded. Lots of adults worked for the Red Cross and the VADs as assistant nurses.
“Proper air raid wardens operated in the big cities such as London and Bristol and were doing very brave and dangerous work during the worst bombing raids. Many ambulance drivers, both men and women, were voluntary workers. Some were pacifists or conscientious objectors who were not willing to fight in the services but were ready to care for those who were fighting and were injured.” 
Mary concluded this chapter of her life by recalling: “one of the good things about wartime was the wonderful comradeship between all these people, all knowing their work was very important and that they must work together for victory and peace.” With war in Europe once again in 2022 these comments are evocatively heartfelt and real as I read agonising accounts from Kiev.

In an article Mary published in our village magazine, (made more poignant when I reread it today along with stories of events in Ukraine), she wrote about her love of clematis plants and the varieties she bought for her garden that bear Polish names. One was named after General Sikorski, prime minister of the wartime Polish government and commander-in-chief of the Polish forces. She was reminded of Sikorski when she looked at her blue clematis. 
“I think of him and Poland’s many years of struggle for independence, somehow preserving her Catholic faith and her national pride. I also remember dashing young Polish airmen who came to England, making a great contribution to eventual victory in 1945. I remember one whose English wife and baby were tragically killed in a rocket attack on London in the last months of the war”. 
I feel that Mary, were she alive today, would have been first in the list of people offering a home to Ukrainians fleeing the horror of war with which Mary was confronted so much in her early life.

Mary was a lover of poetry and in November 1944 bought a copy of Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot when she lived in Cambridge. I wonder, was this bought at Heffers, Bowes and Bowes, Galloway and Porter or Hubert David’s stall in the market? Having worked with the first, attended a job interview at the second and explored the shelves of the third I feel sad I shall never find out which of these famous bookshops supplied Mary.

It was whilst she was living in Cambridge that Mary was playing hockey one day and met George Clarke. George was a Londoner and was educated at Kilburn Grammar School from where he matriculated. His first job was at the St. James’ branch of Lloyds bank. Before the war he joined the RAF (Volunteer Reserve). Mary believed that he had gained his pilot’s licence before the war started. In 1939 he joined Bomber Command with the rank of Warrant Officer. Captaining an Armstrong Whitworth Whitley aircraft in October 1940 the crew were returning from a raid over Berlin when the plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire. George had to take the awful decision for the crew to bale out. They all parachuted successfully and landed safely near the Dutch/German border. They spent the remainder of the war in various POW camps. Clearly a leader and a positive person George took part in steering the POW education programme. Materials were supplied by the Red Cross. Mary recorded: “He seemed to be both lecturing in Maths and also a student; he passed some Institute of Bankers exams.” Being so involved in education his captors must have seen George as no risk to security and left him alone.* 

George returned to England in 1945 and promptly gained admission to the London School of Economics which is how he met Mary Ready. After he had graduated he went back to Lloyds bank. Along with many other ex-RAF personnel he also re-joined the RAFVR, this time the London University Air Squadron. He and Mary were married in December 1947. He continued to fly often. In April 1949 whilst flying a Tiger Moth from Fairoaks aerodrome near Woking in Surrey its engine failed. He attempted a forced landing at Newlands Corner near Guildford but a tree split the petrol tank and the plane burst into flames. George was knocked unconscious having hit his head on the instrument panel. To his good fortune two Irishmen happened to witness the accident and dragged George from the burning plane. Mary and George were never able to trace these Irishmen and thank them despite police enquiries and advertisements they placed in the London newspapers.

George was immediately taken to Guildford County Hospital but after a couple of days he was moved to the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead. He was in a serious condition with severe burns to his hands and face. During the Second World War this hospital had become a specialist burns centre under the control of Sir Archibald McIndoe. It became renowned across the world for pioneering care for RAF and Allied airmen who, like George Clarke in 1949, were badly burned and required reconstructive plastic surgery. 

Mary recalled: “George was in the care of Robin Dale, one of Archibald McIndoe’s plastic surgery team. McIndoe was often mentioned by George but I cannot remember whether he was actually working there or just remembered with considerable respect.”
Mary’s notes continue: “Eighteen months of treatment followed, complicated by toxaemia and by hepatitis from infected blood plasma. Many operations on his hands followed. Facial disfigurement, less severe for George than for many others, was not too bad – a rebuilt nose, and much attention to getting his eyelids to close normally. Saline baths were a regular part of his early treatment. George’s fingers were reduced to one joint, but his thumbs were more or less intact, and the vital flexion was restored by tendon grafts.”

It was whilst reading Mary’s memories of this shocking time in her life that I came to understand that if she had had resilience ingrained in her during her teenage years, stoicism by the bucket load was added in the early 1950s. As George lay in hospital Mary visited him daily, spending long hours travelling to and from the hospital. Most patients being treated here joined the ‘Guinea Pigs’, a social club for the inmates and their families. Allegedly it was set up by McIndoe and others over a bottle of sherry. George became part of the Guinea Pig club observing blind patients and others with awful injuries. (I think of the character played by the handsome Christopher Plummer in the 1969 film The Battle of Britain and the terrifying injuries he sustained, and you get some idea of the effect such burns had on not only the victim but their loved ones too.)

Mary remembered the East Grinstead people as being “marvellous – in the shops, cafes and on the buses – everyone took a pride in treating the QVH chaps as normal, even the very disfigured ones. I think McIndoe and others put in a lot of work at promoting these vital positive attitudes”. 
Here again we see Mary embracing values that came to typify many of her generation and that were the very essence of her. 

There was another significant accomplishment emanating from QVH. Mary wrote about the work of a consultant anaesthetist named Russell Davies. “He took on the task of getting adequate and rational disability pensions from the War Office for the injured servicemen and their widows – no small task; a remarkable achievement and much needed. The burn injuries so frequent with RAF personnel had not previously been assessed adequately and compensated.” It was not just military casualties who were treated at QVH. Mary writes about Jimmy Wright, a RAF Film Unit cameraman, who in the 1950s became a successful independent film maker after being left blind following an air crash in 1945. He is quoted as saying ‘You can't talk to a Guinea-Pig without a pint'. Sadly, there were also civilians being treated and dying; “one, a fish and chip shop owner whose mobile van had caught fire; another a forestry worker.”

I smiled at an incident that Mary recalled from her time in East Grinstead. She went to dances and other social events organised by the Guinea Pig Club, with patients from the hospital and local people and VIPs. 
“I danced with an Indian prince who tried it on, but he was deflected by a diligent attendant and maybe persuaded that it was the patients he was there to encourage.” I am certain that Mary was quite capable of taking care of herself when being propositioned, even if her admirer was part of the aristocracy.

Having been set up in 1941 with just thirty-nine members, the Guinea Pig Club, primarily a social club for the rehabilitated, was closed in 2007. Clearly in its early years it became very important to many members and a central part of their lives. As with such English clubs, reunions would occur regularly. George Clarke was, according to Mary, not a very clubbable person and although he attended early reunions he lost interest. What George did do was to take a firm hold of his life and he decided to re-build it. Mary said: “He announced ‘I am lucky, I can earn my living with my brains’. Lloyds Bank had guaranteed him employment but he applied to Cambridge University to do a postgraduate diploma in agriculture. With this under his belt he began his career as an agricultural economist and later Senior Lecturer in Economics.” 

Once George had taken up his position at St. Catherine’s College Cambridge life for Mary settled down after the uncertainties of the war and George’s partial recovery from his accident. In 1951 the first of their three children, Richenda, was born followed by Robin and Annabel. Then in 1955 George was offered a lectureship at the University of Leeds and the family upsticked to Yorkshire. They bought a house in the Harehills district of Leeds and Mary studied for her PGCE at the Hunslet Lane School. They had moved into a very different landscape; multi-racial, multi-cultural and northern.

After George’s recovery from his serious injuries, he was advised not to live in an industrial environment which Leeds certainly was in the mid 1950s. All of us with memories of that time remember the urban winter smogs. Mary and George were dismayed by the city’s pollution. So, they found and purchased a small primitive cottage high on the Stainmore fells in what was Westmorland. (The county of Westmorland - a beautiful county of sheep, hill farmers, dry stone walls and fells – became absorbed into the larger and new county of Cumbria, a name that I have always disliked. Due to the English regional administrators’ propensity for changing their minds over place names once or twice a century, Westmorland will again become a district of the Lake District in 2024.)

Mary and George’s cottage had no electricity nor mains water. Every weekend they loaded up their canvas topped Landrover with three children, two dogs and basic supplies and headed up to their cottage. They developed quickly a great affection for the wild, rugged scenery and the gentle spirit of the Upper Eden Valley and its people. They explored the local area as well as the fells and lakes of Ullswater and Derwentwater. Oh, what joy it must have been. Being a lover of these fells and lakes myself I can conjure up some sense of what they experienced. Whilst on some fellside ramble they once met the legendary Alfred Wainwright who at this time was just starting to research and publish his unique series of walking guides - multiple copies of which sit, dogeared from use, on my shelves. Having no regard for the fame he went on to garner, Mary was not impressed. She later described him as a bigoted misogynist. I do not argue with this judgement – he was also grumpy and rude. But I value his legacy of the walking guides which have guided me, and countless others, expertly on my tramping of his 214 ‘Wainwrights’.

Mary took a keen interest in the local people that included John Percival who was born in Brough in the Eden district in 1834. Percival was a notable educator and amongst his many appointments was as the first headmaster of Clifton College in Bristol which is close to Mary’s school. In 1998 Mary wrote a letter to the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald (thankfully still so named and going strong today) responding to an article about Percival published previously in the same newspaper. She commented that she often walked along Percival Road, named in his honour when she was at Clifton High School. She wrote that one of her granddaughters was at the High School and another granddaughter and grandson were at Clifton College. What she said in her letter next reveals the true Mary Clarke, reminding us of her belief in equality for all women and men, and showing the inner soul of a very modern woman. She said: “It is interesting to read that John Percival was concerned about the dearth of female companionship in public schools, but I wonder if he visualised the day when they would nearly all be co-educational. With his well-known radical and enlightened views, I think this modern development would have pleased him.” As one of Mary’s daughters says of her letter; “Very Mary!”

Mary didn’t tolerate any form of prejudice or discrimination. A Kirkby Overblow book group member recalls: “When discussing a book about displaced refugees during the Second World War she told us about the Jewish refugee girls (she even remembered their names!) who came to her school and the trouble they had adapting and fitting in. She shared memories of her days as a student at the LSE. Once when reading a book which included a theme of racial discrimination – I think it was The Light between Oceans by M L Steadman – she told us about the time when she and her husband were living in Leeds. Casual racism was common place at that time and when a neighbour came round to welcome them, he informed them that there was an agreement in the street that when moving on ‘we don’t sell to Blacks’. Rather than stay silent, as perhaps many would have done not wishing to fall out with neighbours, Mary spoke up and told the neighbour exactly what she thought of their agreement!”

In 1972 Mary and George wanted to move out of the city. They bought a plot of land in Sicklinghall near Wetherby. According to a friend of theirs in this village, they had been looking at houses for some time when a building plot on the edge of the village became available. “George, who was a notorious procrastinator, hummed and hawed as to whether to submit a tender to buy the land. Eventually, on the day before the bids were submitted, he decided to bid and Mary had to run to the post box in heavy snow to post the bid. They won the auction, built their house and moved in; their three children having left home by then.”

Her many talents and interests included horse riding and Mary and her new friends attended a nearby riding school and rode out into the countryside. I don’t think George was enamoured of horses so to ensure he too got out into the Yorkshire Dales he and Mary would walk. They walked a lot, being members of the Wetherby Footpath Club. They wrote books on the paths around Wetherby. They ventured out to explore the Yorkshire Moors. All her life she remained a keen rambler and was always anxious to protect public access rights by writing to local councils about missing signposts and blocked public footpaths. I can imagine those letters brought terror to the lives of the recipients who knew they had fresh work to do. They would have recognised the letter writer as someone not to be ignored.
Mary retained a keen work ethic that was not compromised by managing her family life. She was a keen and active supporter of the Liberal Party. She had full days outside her home with a career in both counselling and social work. She worked with children with special needs. Mary was concerned that everyone should have the best chance in life. As the result of a talk with the chaplain of the Young Offenders Institution at Wetherby she became a volunteer there visiting the young men weekly. She was able to see the good in them and believed that what they lacked was a granny to give them time and love in their childhood. One young man was a father. Mary asked him if he and his girlfriend had thought about any birth control suggesting that condoms were easily available and inexpensive. Mary wrote “I was forced to smile and agree with the young man when he said that they felt rather like paddling in socks and he thought it spoiled the experience”.
For many years Mary and George coped magnificently overcoming his disabilities until his death in 1990 aged seventy-one. Mary and her children may have feared his life would not be a long one, for he, and they, had had to endure the after effects of his appalling injuries for forty years. Mary threw herself into the multiple tasks of overseeing her children’s careers and lives, managing the family home and continuing her own outside work. As one of her Sicklinghall friends recorded: “Mary was never outfaced by difficulties and took the challenges in her life with fortitude and never complained. She turned from riding to swimming and dog walking – she became a passionate dog lover, especially of border terriers. She even grew to enjoying managing her own affairs.”

Writing around 2001 Mary looked back on her experiences in the war: “War damaged both my husband and my brother. In 1992 we had a family service at the tiny Culbone church on Exmoor, a favourite place, to dedicate a bench in their memory. During the service I was deeply touched when my nephew read these lines from T.S. Eliot: -

        And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
        They can tell you, being dead: the communication 
        Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Mary shared her love of poetry and words one evening in 2015 at a memorable outdoor gathering of village folk. Members of the now world-famous Kirkby Overblow Dramatic Society, known to all as KODS, met to present a review made up of sketches, songs and poems. Mary recited from memory one of her favourite poems, perhaps recalling her discovery of her Stainmore cottage. Rereading this yet again I can see why she identified with this poignant pastoral poem. The young, idealistic W.B. Yeats as narrator longs to build a simple life on Innisfree, finding peace through communion with nature. However, it becomes clear that ties to city life prevent the speaker from realizing this dream. 

        I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
        And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
        Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
        And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

        And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
        Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
        There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
        And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

        I will arise and go now, for always night and day
        I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
        While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
        I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

In 1987 Mary met Bridget Bennett, another incomer to Yorkshire whose long and deep commitment to the community is eminent. A close friendship was formed or was it rekindled? They discovered that they may have met in 1947 on Exmoor when they holidayed with their respective families, the girls riding on the moor and rock-jumping in the river. Mary attributed her sure footedness to those days spent rock-jumping and swimming at Sillery Sands on the north coast of Devon east of Lynmouth. Bridget recalls that back then they had to walk everywhere in Devon because petrol was rationed.

After George’s death Mary - with her friends Bridget, Margaret Harcourt, Catherine Catton and others - started a weekly walking expedition that pulled in visits to the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors. Then they ventured further afield to Mull, Arran, Northumberland and walked the mule tracks of Mallorca. Each of Mary’s friends tells comic stories of walking with Mary. They complained that whilst Mary could climb over stiles quickly and easily the rest of them had to work out where to place their feet and hands. She was an enthusiastic rambler and her companions had trouble keeping up with her. She had an uncompromising attitude to personal responsibility and self-reliance. She gently admonished one of the ‘girls’ who fell badly when climbing a stile late in life. Upon hearing of the misfortune Mary sent a note expressing not her sympathy but surprise and her firm advice when climbing stiles: “one must concentrate”.

I shared a love of walking and maps with Mary, particularly Ordnance Survey maps. When she discovered I had worked closely in a business capacity with OS for over forty years she articulated her detailed appreciation of their maps with enthusiasm. As I do, Mary Clarke also loved books and a good story. She was a core member of first the Sicklinghall book group and afterwards the group in Kirkby Overblow. A book’s story that involved travelling or movement around a particular country, city or landscape required a map, and she was always very disappointed if the author had not supplied one. On several occasions she and I would reflect on the intellectual connection between a particular place and its people. Throughout her life she had a joy of travelling and becoming involved in any local community in which she found herself.

At the age of eighty-five Mary was up for a new adventure in her life. She decided to move house. She heard about a single storey house in Kirkby Overblow with sublime views over the Wharfe valley that was on the market and she acquired it. It is a quirky house with steep steps up from the house to the street. They are so steep and uneven everyone feared for her safety. “I shan’t fall”, she would say. “It is important to plan for dangerous situations, I don’t need any help thank you”. On frosty mornings she would clear the ice from the steps herself, starting at the bottom step “so I don’t have to put a foot on the ice. It’s quite simple and straightforward”.
Long before her arrival in Kirkby Overblow Mary was an active member of the church community. The Rev Stuart Lewis, rector of the benefice of Lower Wharfedale, writes: “I first met Mary as a parishioner in Sicklinghall, a member of the Parochial Church Council and a benefice supporter.  She appeared to be doing exactly what a community minded person ought to be doing at that stage of her life. There came a reference request from HM Young Offenders Prison at Wetherby and in discussion with Mary, I gained an insight into a hitherto unrealised background in her social work in some of the more difficult parts of Leeds.” 
Indeed, as we in Kirkby Overblow discovered, she was a devout Christian. She held bible readings in her homes in Yorkshire and attended church services every week. Right up until a month before her death, she bravely climbed her steps and up the hill to the village church aided by her ‘walking buggy’. This buggy was fitted with reflective tape to enable her to be out and about at night. She shunned all offers of a supporting arm. At church she led prayers on a number of occasions at the Celtic worship service when she would give a memorable reflection on her chosen topic. She loved the simplicity of Celtic worship, she had little time for what she considered to be unnecessary church ceremony.
For all the positivity that her personality exhibited Mary was forthright too about what she did not
like. She was not a baker. “I don’t bake,” she said. “Buy a cake instead. It’s much easier than 
spending two hours on your feet in the kitchen before visitors arrive for coffee.” She was not 
computer literate and got cross with bank staff who instructed her to do things online. 
She was prophetic when it came to considering the internet. She told us she “had a lot to recall and read about throughout my life especially most recently my pretty blue clematis. Being an internet illiterate, I do mean read, including pages of information my daughter sent me, from something called Wikipedia. Poor old Encyclopaedia Britannica, you’ll soon be forgotten - or maybe someone will breed a new flower and call it ‘Britannica’; sounds a whole lot better than ‘Wikipedia’”. Only this week as I write this I see that reference books are no longer listed by the Office for National Statistics as essential items for consumers.

In 2021 Mary was advised by her friends and family to get the covid jabs. She had an instant response; she had clearly thought about this invasion in all our lives. She replied: “It’s not me who should be vaccinated, it’s the young folk. If I were to get covid I don’t want to take up a hospital bed and I certainly don’t want one of Boris’s vibrators. Save those for the younger people.” We think we know what she meant.

By 2021 her body had begun to lose much of its strength and she had a period of time in hospital. In the final weeks of her life, in typical fashion, she discharged herself from hospital to return to her home. She announced she wanted a party. Treasured friends were invited. Wine and refreshments were ordered in. Margaret Harcourt recalls: “we sat out in her garden so she could enjoy the company of a few of us. Mary was, for an hour, her old self, chatting away as we enjoyed wine and canapés.” Margaret, by now well recovered from her argument with the stile and back tramping the fields in the Wharfe valley, was again advised by Mary to concentrate.

In writing this short life about a very certain woman I knew I wanted to conclude with a description of the essence of Mary Clarke. Stuart Lewis set me off with a perceptive start.
“The biggest mistake one could make with regard to Mary was to make assumptions on the basis of her being the sort of person you expected her to be.  Her intelligent and informed conversation, her interest in the arts, her joy of travelling and involvement in the local community were firmly rooted in an understanding of the bricks life could throw and the mess they could make of people’s lives.” She did indeed surprise people with her acute observations of human nature.
Despite the terrors and hardship life threw at her earlier in life Mary loved the world and its people. She had an ease and friendship with all people. She could see the potential in situations that might challenge others. Her quiet inner strength and confidence - laced with a healthy humour - are characteristics of people who are comfortable with themselves. She was a woman of considerable intelligence and possessed of a sharp brain. When she perceived a friend experiencing trouble in their life she was a good listener and offered wise advice. Sometimes, as one friend recalls, “that advice could be quite bracing.”
I had the good fortune to meet Mary Clarke in her landscape of later life. It enriched mine and those of the friends she made. Yet these landscapes are also shifting sands. Mary lived for almost a century during which the world changed immeasurably. She had witnessed others around her living through tragedy and experiencing hardship. She herself withstood very hard times early in her marriage. Because of these experiences, or maybe despite them, she was resolute and brave hearted. Perhaps one of the reasons she loved the poetry of T.S. Eliot was that they had a common experience of having been air raid wardens in war time. I shall select for Mary some last words from Little Gidding she may have chosen herself:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)

Mary and family c. 1953

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

  An article written by George Clarke was printed in the Summer 1946 issue of Clare Market Review, the student journal of the London School of Economics. He had arrived there in October 1945 having spent 4½ years as a prisoner -of-war in Germany. In this intriguing article, entitled The Experiment, George writes “If it be agreed that a definition of Economics which lays stress on the scarcity of the means of satisfying wants is no less acceptable than definitions which stress other aspects of the subject, then there should be no difficulty in appreciating that Prisoners-of-War are very favoured people. Was it not their good fortune to be privileged to study Economics in a society where scarcity was their very tutor?” This is an interesting hypothesis. I can quite understand why Mary was so attracted to George. She lived her life expressing similar, original challenges to situations you and I might find ordinary and unquestionable. George’s description of his time as a prisoner-of-war includes an enlightening account of the humble cigarette acting as hard currency for internal trade; and his sociological digression into “community-consciousness”. Both are very relevant today when we consider how prisoners-of-war in Ukraine and Russia are coping with captivity.


Acknowledgements:

In 2021 I wrote a shortened version of the life of Mary Clarke for publication in the Kirkby Overblow village magazine. These two pieces could not have been written without a collection of memories from Mary’s daughters and her friends in Yorkshire. I am indebted to them all; particularly, to her daughters Richenda Appleyard and Annabel Watkinson. They not only shared their memories and reflections of their mother’s life but provided copies of Mary’s and George’s notes and published letters and articles. Mary’s Yorkshire friends have contributed much material and I have included some of their loving comments. I thank them all: Bridget Bennett, Catherine Catton, Margaret Harcourt, Stuart Lewis, Vanda McKenzie, Derek and Lois Plows, Carol Simmonds and Ann Wroe.

 

Thursday 3 March 2022

Mount Bogong

I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum 
Of human cities torture 
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – Lord Byron

I climb a mountain to raise me up. I climb to lift myself above daily routines. I climb to reach out and experience not only what is in front of me but also what is around the corner. I climb a physical path and it takes me into a metaphysical place where I sense the nature of life. The act of departure from the base is no different on Bogon than on Blencathra. What’s different about the next steps of ascent onto an Australian mountain are the trees, the birds and the enveloping warmth.

A humbling feature for anyone climbing a mountain outside of the highest of the Himalayas is that you know you are following in many thousand pairs of footsteps. When climbing Mount Bogong in the Australian state of Victoria this year I learned that 40,000 years separate me from the earliest climbers. The first indigenous people of Australia to climb up from the River Kiewa and over Bogong were the Dhudhuroa people. They came twice a year in almost a ritualistic manner. They travelled for a very important reason into this ancient, stunning and inspirational landscape. There are only around 2,000 Dhudhoroa people living in Victoria today and few of them visit the mountain; there is a modern moral here.

When I set off with my elder son at dawn this January (concerned about my energy levels and fitness to climb 1986 metres in thirty-five degrees of heat), the timeless question of why do I still climb mountains still entered my head. The answers, some listed above, came to mind. It is a ritual perhaps in part but only a very personal ritual. At least I spent a rare and valuable day with Matthew but it’s not a wider community thing. Yet for the Dhudhoroa people it was not only a ritual, it was an essential political event in their lives.

Climbing up from the valley of the River Kiewa, just as we did this year, the Dhuddhoroa took part in the Bogong Moth ceremonies. When they reached the open areas near the summit of Bogong they met up with other Aboriginal peoples such as the Yaithmathang who inhabited the high plains of this land. I learned many enriching new facts about Australia this day but these meetings of indigenous clans surprised me. Hitherto I believed that different Aborigine people were wary of socialising with other clans. Yet here I discovered that the Dhuddhoroa and the Yaithmathang not only collected moths for food but settled disputes, arranged marriages and made alliances between highland clans. (As I edit this piece on the seventh day of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine I am reminded that there are other ways of settling disputes. However, the Aborigines were the epitome of rationality in the way they lived their lives whilst Mr. Putin appears to lack all rationality.
I would like to arrange for Presidents Putin and Zelensky to be airlifted to the summit of Mount Elbrus in Russia and instructed to not come down until they have consumed a few moths and sorted out their differences. Sadly, it will never happen.) 

I should explain the ceremonies as it is astonishing to think that people could thrive on eating moths. Bogong Moths migrate twice a year to these mountains. They are big; up to 1.4 inches long and apparently they are meaty and tasty. The Aborigine men would trap large numbers of moths in nets. Then the moths would be roasted and the chaff removed. The residue was pounded into cakes and smoked to prolong usability. The result does not sound nutritious to me but clearly I have not tried them.

Once Matthew and I had set off from the base of the Staircase Spur below Bogong it was soon getting hotter. There was no wind. Around and above us came the calls and shrieks of birds such as Noisy Miners, parrots, lorikeets and wattlebirds. The narrow path - the width of one person - is extremely steep and rocky. The thick canopy of gum and box trees traps the heat in. A haze of eucalyptus mist enveloped us. After two hours my stomach was cramping and I required a dump. Matthew had warned of snakes inhabiting this area so it was with some trepidation I lowered my shorts. 

Feeling better after a clear out, then eating some Vegemite sandwiches and downing more water than I was used to, we set off in search of the Bivouac Hut which is roughly half way to the summit. There we found campers rolling their sleeping bags and about to continue the climb. There are notices at the hut about the dangers of being on Bogong in the winter months. Avalanches and cornice break offs occur on these slopes. Three climbers perished in a blizzard in August 1943. Two snowboarders lost their lives near here in July 2014.

After another hour of trudging through thick forest I was thinking this climb was a poor idea. My legs felt heavy and tired and I reminded myself that we had to descend as well; always more painful with wonky knees and hips. 
But gradually the forest thinned and we caught glimpses of distant mountain ranges. Finally, we broke out from tree cover altogether. Despite the thermometer reading thirty-six degrees the air was fresher. Lifting our eyes from the rocky path we could see for seventy miles across densely forested ranges of hills blue in the midday heat. Climbing at last to the highest point in all of the state of Victoria we were struck by the beauty of the summit fields with their backcloth of the vast mountain ranges in every direction. I then knew that the plan to climb this mountain was a good one.
Beneath our feet were patches of giant Bottle-daisies, Rosy Hyacinth-orchids, speedwell and violets. Around us fluttered huge white butterflies. There was still no wind. There was an immense sense of calm, it was so quiet. It was here where the Dhuddhoroa and the Yaithmathang peoples met and hunted moths, (none of which we saw, it was the wrong time of year). Here where they settled their differences and forged alliances. Yes, it is a reverential place. I had to prod myself and be reminded that Matthew and I had climbed to the highest point of the state; my head was still clearing from the numbing intoxication of eucalyptus oil. In a wild and remote landscape, we looked down on the world and it marvelled us as it must have marvelled our predecessors over 40,000 years.

There are many reasons for climbing a mountain as I have said - the mundane ones such as, ‘because it is there’ and feeling a sense of physical achievement also still apply. This year our extra reward for climbing this mountain is a feeling of separation from the crap of modern life that lately has fomented madness amongst some national leaders. Up here I could briefly forget that the art of political compromise, enacted by the Aborigine clans, is deserting some of our ‘elected’ politicians and seemingly leading us to war. I could forget too about climate change and the pandemic, but only briefly. Our beautiful planet, admired from this mountain summit, is being destroyed by the very people who inhabit it. The Dhuddhoroa and the Yaithmathang peoples knew how to live in the landscapes they encountered. They are the masters of sustainable living. Oh, how we Europeans abused them and the land, from the moment of Captain Cook’s landfall in 1770 until 1972 when the Australian prime minister declared the policy of White Australia was over. During two hundred years of arrogance and imposition of the British rule of law, the Aborigine suffered under the feet of our ancestors. That Western liberal democracy has now been under attack from within for some years. Now it is from the outside by a murderous Russian - not for the first time. Europeans eventually came to our senses with regard to our attitude to the Aborigine; we show signs of doing so again over Russian autocrats.

I felt reluctant to leave this wondrous mountain top. After having the place to ourselves for fifteen minutes our tranquillity was broken by the sounds of loud male voices coming from below on the Eskdale Spur track, our route down. So, we set off to let them take our place. Four boisterous South American lads, carrying enormous backpacks and clutching bottles of beer, greeted us with their story of having missed a turn on the mountains the day before and so had to camp out under the stars. Three were from Chile and one from Peru. They were an instant reminder of the kinship and harmony that can exist amongst differing clans.
After another three hours we arrived at the Eskdale Spur Trailhead. As we did we met two Australian men clad in shorts and tee-shirts - also clutching bottles of beer, but with no backpacks or water – in all seriousness saying they were climbing to the top. Crazy; no Australian beer I have come across, and I have tasted many in Matthew’s company, will sustain you on a mountain climb. Now if it was a pint or two of Black Sheep bitter from Yorkshire, that would be a different matter. 

We still had four miles to walk along the forest floor back to our car. I have not been in the Singapore jungle but imagined I was. I wondered how I would have performed as a prisoner of war, being force marched in such conditions as we encountered here. We were walking at speed in high humidity, descended on by swarms of insects and with the threat of snakes. Insects included the sizeable March Fly, the bite of which is suddenly painful and draws blood. And then we confronted our first black snake, sunning itself in the middle of our track. It slithered into the undergrowth, more scared of us than we of it.

A week after our ascent of Mount Bogong we again set out to climb, this time the second highest peak in Victoria, Mount Feathertop. Like Bogong it is a hard climb for a septuagenarian with dodgy hips. This time it took us over four hours to reach the summit. Feathertop’s summit is wholly different to Bogong’s. We could almost have been on the top of a beloved Lakeland fell. The peak is small and steeply sided, devoid of undergrowth, flowers and butterflies. Cloud cover swirled up and down around us, blocking out intermittingly the views of more vast ranges of hills in all directions. It was even cold enough to put a woollen jumper over our tee-shirts. 

The descent from Mount Feathertop along Razorback Track is over seven miles long. It hugs the side of a hill before twisting one way and then another before dropping down into a forest of ghostly eucalypts that was burned out by bushfires in 2020. 

The stems of the trees stand starkly bare and mysteriously white against the blue mountains and carpets of lush grass. We eventually ended up at Mount Hotham, one of Australia’s principal ski resorts. Here ski lifts and Alpine architecture stand out incongruously against the forested skyline. We were met by the rest of our family - the youngest aged nearly three chased lizards and skinks and hoped for a snake – they reminded us of their value to us, their essential part of us and what we live for. They brought us back to earth after our lofty conversations with God. We dined at a pub in the bizarrely named ski resort of Diner Plain. A ski resort in high summer is one weird place to be.
Climbing mountains can be a lonely activity but one in which I come close to understanding what life is about. Walking amongst the giants of Victoria and the lesser heights of Lakeland in Cumbria brings with it a sense of proportion. I look down on the earth and feel what is good, what is worth living for. (Yes, I reflected briefly on the past horror show in the White House and current one in the Kremlin but try not to let them spoil my view of the world.) Despite the clambering of millions of feet on the summits of Bogong and Feathertop I still gained a primal sense that this land reminds me of the most important aspects of life on earth. The Dhudhuroa people came to these mountains, transacted their business - both social and political – and left those landscapes as they found them. In the three weeks we spent in the High Country of Victoria this year I never once saw an indigenous Australian climbing the mountains. Some of them may do it when I am not looking but I have my doubts. The reasons are all too obvious.

Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan:

The mountains look on Marathon –
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free

Let us substitute Ukraine for Greece.