Anton's Ideas

<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/always-something-there-to-remind-me/”>Always Something There to Remind Me</a>

music that reminds me

LA CI DAREM LA MANO

Of all the really great tunes that I have heard in my life, pop, classical, country and western, operatic arias, ballads et al it has always been the catchy  –  ‘want to sing or whistle it again’  –  quality that has made me put it in my favourites. There are many songs and tunes that set me going, foot tapping or rushing for the nearest piano if there is one, to join in and enjoy myself. But there I have mentioned the luckiest, lovliest thing in my physical life. My mother’s half of the family were all well known singers, actors and entertainers so of course I was brought up with a piano in the house and loved sitting trying to make the keys play a tune from as early in my life as I can remember.

My father, who was a journalist and nothing to do with  the theatrical side of the family was a modest pianist himself and it was he who first spotted in me the natural ability to pick up a tune and reproduce it. I must have been about three and few months because it was just before we moved from Buckinghamshire to East Sheen near Richmond in London, that mum was playing arias from the Marriage of Figaro on a 78 record player. Records in those days, July(?) 1945 were not of the acoustic quality of today, but never the less the wonderful soulful yet bouncing melody of Cherubino’s Aria ‘voi que sapete’ really turned me on. I listened to it about five times through and then went to the piano and tried to find the right notes to play the tune. It was as I was on about the fifteenth attempt and getting to the  stage where I wanted to smash the piano to bits that my father came in. He just looked at me and said.

“Do that again. No seriously, it sounded just like one of the Arias from Figaro. But you couldn’t have taught yourself!” I couldn’t, and didn’t believe him. I thought he was joking. so I played the same notes through again to the end of the sixteenth bar. Then I looked at him inquisitively. All he said was brief and to the point.

“You were playing ‘voi que sapete’, in the wrong key, the wrong tempo and with one or two notes of your own, and an inability to finish it. Also your feet don’t reach the pedals. But if you taught yourself to do even that by imitation then as soon as we’ve settled into the new house we’re getting you a piano teacher. Also were taking the grand piano with us and the family can fight over who owns it later.”Both before and after we moved  I continued to enjoy trying to imitate tunes with my parents showing me where I was going wrong and teaching me the basics of music. The very basics I assure you. But then one day I was introduced to  an Italian gentleman who was very polite and called mummy ‘Madamina’. She seemed to like it. I was told that though I was only three and eight months I was going to have a well known concert pianist to teach me. The words and signifcance of the remark meant nothing. But he was very polite and called me ‘little Sir’. I thought this odd but nice. Then on that very first lesson he asked me an extraordinary question.

“Is it true that you like Mozart?” I was three and a half for heaven’s sake! So I nodded and when he asked me if there were any tunes I could play I knew the family had been talking. So I just went straight at it and played the basic melody of an aria, mummy said that was what you called songs in operas, and knew I had only done the begining and the wonderful speeded up end. It was dreadful musically and pianistically and yet I managed to rescue and include the main tune and at the  -almost – right tempo. The teacher just looked at me.

“What is that called and what is it from?”

I was glad I had remembered. “It was meant to be ‘larchy daremla marno But I don’t know the opera”. I did but was too embarrassed to grossly mispronounce Don Giovanni. I had no command of Italian at all in those days. But the teacher never said a word. He put his fingers to his lips, pointed to his fingers and my eyes and proceeded  to play a beautiful piano version of La Ci Darem La Mano. I meant to say how good he was, how much I liked it and all the right things but that was not what came out. All I said was,

“Please teach me to play like that, Sir, please. I’ll practise every day of my life if you do. And as he got up from the piano stool a bit later at the end of that lesson I looked at the lovely grand piano and the reflection on the lid of a laughing, smiling face that stopped me getting off the stool. Then it vanished. That evening I asked dad the names of the characters in the aria  because I had only heard it as a gramaphone recording and thus also as a duet. He couldn’t remember. It was my aunt who told me it was the evil Don Giovanni who was trying to kiss a peasant girl called Zerlina. I didn’t blame him if she was the face I had seen on the piano.

I was eight before I could honestly say I could play the piano properly, fluently and because I had worked my insides out at it. As Mozart had never written a piano version of the duet I had to be satisfied with just improving my own versions. I think in many ways this was the best thing I could do. But I had to play the established piano solo pieces of those days and my teacher  became more and more pleased with me.  I was eight and a half when he heard that our music master at school was a former leading pianist but who now concentrated on making every boy in the school sing most of the standard Masses and was also Abbey choir master. But he was also an opera freak. We had 40 minutes of music twice a week and he used half the lessons to teach us to sing all the leading operatic arias for tenor, baritone and bass, but this was my second piece of luck. I had a voice like a rusty wheel and so in the music classes was placed at the end of the front row. I was not encouraged to sing very loudly, if at all, but joy of joys, my eyes were exactly in line with the keyboard and I could follow his fingers. It was half way through my second year at the school before circumstances arose that gave me the courage to take my piano teacher’s advice and tell him I could play the piano.

“Please sir, you know you said there was a school concert  at Easter at the end of term, well can anyone audition to play? I have been told to ask you by my piano teacher.” When I named him the music master just stared at me.

“How long has he been teaching you? I mean what level are you at? ” I was extremely honest.

“Five years, since I was three and eight months, and he says I am his best pupil for my age. But I am too shy to take exams  in playing and don’t know what the correct grade is that I have reached. But this is the last lesson before morning break, so could I play you something for a few minutes to let you see what you think.?” He asked me what I wanted to play. Considering the time I decided to play the piece I was currently studying, Valses Poeticos by the Spanish composer Granados. When I told him he almost laughed. But just gestured to me to see what I could do. Well I loved the variations in the eleven minute piece and played it as well as I could. I had no idea just how good I was. He moved from his usual position at his desk and sat where I would usually sit so he could see my fingering and control of the pedals. I began with the intricate introductory melody in waltz time which always used to make me think of two people in evening dress, dancing  under a spot light and then using the whole eleven and a half minutes to express every emotion I presumed two people in love would experience. As the variations changed so did my touch on the keys which I actually felt depicted the change in the dancers’ feelings. This did not go unnoticed.

I had been playing studiously and really enjoying what I was doing  for about five or six minutes when I glanced at my school master to see how I was doing. His face was a study in total amazement. He was lost in what he was hearing. When I reached the last frenetic two and a half minutes I glanced at him again, and even though he wore glasses I noticed he had tears in his eyes. It just inspired me to put every ounce of feeling I could into the final four, ever  so slow bars, as I imagined the dancers falling into each others’ arms. I even held the last soft bass note for some fifteen seconds longer than I had done on previous practice sessions. Then I slumped forward over the keys and let out a long sigh of completely exhausted and total delight.

My music master slowly got up and walked back to his desk, removing his spectacles and composing himself. Then he turned to me and said,

“Wills-Eve, I know your family includes many noted entertainers but do any of them play the piano like that?” I shook my head,waiting for his opinion. It took a couple of minutes coming, and after one question. “Why do you never sit grade exams? If you are to get anywhere in music you really must you know! Oh I expect you want to know what I think. Well many people are born with natural genius that can never be taught. Your piano playing  is in that category. I have heard that piece played many times and by the greatest pianists of the thirties and forties, but never have I heard that degree of perfection emanate from human hands. When at the piano you transfer your heart through your fingers to the keyboard and that is what I heard. It was one of the highlights of my life. You will play it at the school concert and, despite your age, you will top the bill as the main soloist and play the last piece before the choir sings us out with something which I have not yet chosen. Oh, and thank you for making an ill, elderly man very happy. “

“Sir, I did not know you were ill and I shall certainly not mention it to a soul. But in return would you please not tell anyone at all that I am the last soloist in the concert. I could just about manage to play in front of an audience if they did not know it was me until they sat down and read the programme. Do you understand now why I have never sat grade exams?” And I smiled at him and left the room with a skip in my step as the next class of twelve year olds came into the music room and wondered what I was doing.

But to return to La ci darem la mano.  I often loosened up my fingers before starting a set practice piece at home by playing one of my own straightforward, but by now much more comlex, versions of the lovely aria.  However, I don’t think Signor Pirelli ever heard me. He may never have heard my enjoyment of the song since that very first lesson for all he ever remarked on the piece. I used it when warming up for the school concert, which I was dreading, and it helped calm me down. Nothing more so than the lovely face that smiled at me as I sat at the piano stool before a large audience of parents, teachers and pupils, all of whom seemed staggered at the obvious age of the soloist. I took a gulp and played the lovely waltz variations.  So long was the ovation when I finished and so strong the cries for an encore that I finally signaled to the audience to hush, and in my forthright if unbroken voice said,

“Thank you all so much for enjoying that gorgeous music and as you seem to want a short encore I would like to play the opus K96 by Domenico Scarlatti, which while only some four to five minutes nearly takes the arms off you. You will see why it is also called ‘the chase'” When I finished one of the most difficult and striking pieces of baroque music, which not even Signor Pirelli knew I could play, the applause went on so long we ended the concert there without the chorale finale. I was seen as a prodigy at that concert had I wanted to become one. But my family did not. All approaches over the next few days were turned down and both the school and the various impressarios and agents who wanted to sign me were turned away. Fortunately I knew nothing of this as it was handled way above my head.

In amongst all the changes in our family and my personal life during the next seven years, approximately, one of the most important in the long run was a change of neighbours next door. The house was not as large as ours but still had some twenty five rooms and nearly an acre of garden. Its grounds carried on up the side of the common where ours stopped. We soon met the owners who also turned out to be Catholics and would be going to the same parish church as us. He was a banker and she the mother of seven children. More than that we didn’t know for a week or two.

At that time I suppose it must have been 10 solid years of piano practice that made it possible for me to make some sort of attempt at playing Beethoven’s first piano concerto. I was so pleased with myself for managing it that I just collapsed over the keys and almost passed out with exhaustion. Signor Pirelli had given me a 45 minute lesson that day as I told him that at last I could do it, although it had to be without an orchestra. He clapped loudly when I finished but told me that just getting ALL the right notes in the right order was not enough if I was to have any chance in the national under fifteen competition in three months time. I had a lot of work to do, not least on conquering my nervous anxiety at the thought of playing before such an audience. It was only my teacher’s influence that had let me get through all the preliminary rounds to reach the finals. He often told me later that he never realised just how ill I was.

Then it happened. I was fourteen and a half years old and almost totally absorbed with piano, cricket, mediaeval history, hagiography and languages and only just beginning to notice my own reactions to one or two attractive girls of around or just under my own age. As I sat up after playing the Beethoven concerto I turned round, and in truth I nearly fainted.

All I saw was a face, but what a face. I thought it was aged about eight and I later turned out to be almost spot on. She just stared at me open mouthed. I think I was blushing and laughing at the same time when she said, “How on earth did you do that? I only heard the last ten minutes, the rondo isn’t it? but it was incredible. Who are you?” I didn’t answer at first because just looking at that lovely laughing , slightly embarrased face, I realised I was looking at Zerlina. Somehow I always knew she would enter my life. But now that it had happened I knew that I was doubly lost. But I had to answer and heard myself saying “Zerlina.

“My name’s Anton Wills-Eve and I am fourteen and three quarters. I was starting to master my entry for the national piano competition. Are you here for a lesson?”

She looked straight at me.”But you live next door to us. We only recently moved in. Much as I love Don Giovanni I’m afraid I’m called Lucy. I don’t mind Lucia if you prefer!” I laughed out loud and said ,

“Sorry, I must explain why I called you Zerlina,” and I played the first half of my easiest to follow version of La ci darem. “It was your laughing smile, it is how I always picture the girl in my favourite aria.” To my surprise, and my teacher’s, she sat down beside me and in a basic verson of the melody went straight into the finale, but also sang Zerlina’s part in Italian. I joined in as soon as I could and as we finished on that lovely chord Signor Pirelli laughed. “Ah children I shall enjoy teaching you both so much now.”

But you can see how carefully I would have to deal with my favourite song from now on.

AWE

<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/dear-mom/”>Dear Mom</a>

Dear Mama

DEAREST MOTHER

As this is my two hundredth blog in the past 20 months I decided to follow the prompt as closely as I could with a true story if possible.  And what prompt did I see to my amazement? ‘A letter to my mother’.  Awwww, so sweet. What a choice. You bet your sweet bippy it was. I have decided to reproduce some family letters dated mid August 1968, from Singapore and Saigon where I worked as a journalist.

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“Dear Mum. I was so sorry to hear that dad had been so ill in Spain and that you had returned early to England without carrying on running your hotel. I know how much he would have been enjoying it, but a heart attack is a heart attack. So I do understand your plea for as much money as I can afford. At least we can save here so I hope it helps.

By the way, how are you. You have been dying on us for ten years and I do hope your empahsyma is under control now. Michele (my sister) and I will do all we can to help keep you going, but it is a shame that I have had to put off Lucy’s trip out here. I hope the delay won’t be for too long. She was so excited, and we were going to get married. I desparately need her, mum, my nerves are shot to pieces and I don’t think I can last much longer without her. But considering how much you and dad spent and sacrificed on Michele and me as we grew up I had to do all I could for you first. But I have asked Lucy to visit you and make sure everything is okay and whether you want anything. Do please tell her.

I have another five days here before returning to Saigon. I have been shot twice, mortared and blown up five times and am frankly at my wits’ end. Also my agoraphobia, you know how awful it was at school, has come back worse than ever and I would have sent you more money but, as during my seven years in Paris, I have to take taxis everywhere. It eats up my salary dreadfully. That’s why I need Lucy so much. She really calms me down and it was only during the months I had in England before coming out here, you know beteen visits to Isreal for the six day war, that I really felt happy and well. Don’t tell her though, I have never upset her with tales of my awful anxiety. That story is for me alone when  I feel I can tell her without upsetting her too much. They put me on very strong transqulisers a couple of months ago, but only my prayers really work.

Well I don’t want to get too depressing, so take care and look after dad and Gran as well as yourself.

Lots of love and God Bless.x x x

Anton

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August 27 1968. (from my sister)

“Dearest Ant,

I don’t want to upset you, Ant, as you are back in hell, but it was really terrible. Lucy came down the other day but only John (Michele’s husband) and I were at home when she arrived. I explained mum and dad were back in hospital and she wouldn’t be able to see them. You know her, she was terribly sorry but never dreamed for a minute I was lying.  They had gone back to Richmond for the day on purpose to miss her as mum said she was not encouraging anyone to steal her son. Really, those were her words. I often wondered why she had been so lukewarm toward little Luce as we’d known her eleven years, but I saw it now. It was pure selfishness.

When I got home I rang Sandy because a thought struck me. You know how much you two got on like a house on fire. I couldn’t believe she’d turned you down two years ago before you met Lucy again. She hadn’t. After your proposal she was over the moon and told Mum the same afternoon. Even showed her the ring. Mum tore into her and made up stories of your chasing after every girl you saw and that you’d only proposed to her because you thought you’d made her pregnant and couldn’t face her father. Sandy was so shaken she could not even ask you if it was true. Are you getting the picture now? I don’t want to speak ill of Mum as she’s dying anyway, but when I told John of what she’d said about Lucy he lost the plot. He went round to their house and really tore into her. You know how it was only the pleading of you and Luce that made it finally possble for our parents to accept John as a son in law, well he didn’t let her forget it. I’m sorry if you didn’t want this, but I stole the letter you wrote mum and showed it to Lucy. I think she’s saving up to get the next plane to Asia that she can afford. I’m sorry, but it’s all been so terrible. Anyway, let me  cheer you up by telling you Surrey won by seven wickets yesterday.

Love

Miche x x

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message to willseve,saigon: return singapore at once, family illness: august 30

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The only thought in my mind during the brief flight to Singapore was ‘which one’? I was met by the Singapore boss at the airport and was told my father had had another heart attack. For 14 hours I was half asleep half in tears and was met at the airport by Lucy. She didn’t drive when I left England but had a lovely sports car, John had lent it to her. I just clung to her for quarter of an hour in the car park and didn’t know what to say. We said nothing. But I calmed down a lot and knew my Lucy was all I needed. On the drive home from the airport she went via the hospital where I saw John and Michele by Dad’s bed. He looked so ill, but pleased to see me.  After an indescribable half hour we carried on driving home.

Mum was a pale colour, having awful trouble breathing. When she saw it was Lucy who had brought me she  literally had a siezure and we called an ambulance. It took us to the local cottage hospital and Lucy offered to drive back to the main hospital to get Michele and John.

They fitted mum up in an oxygen tent and a asked if I could hold her hand. They let me. I was numbed as her gasps of breath became worse by the second. It took only ten minutes for her to die and she never spoke or opened her eyes. When the nurses removed the tent I knelt by her bed and prayed for the repose of her soul. It was thus that the other three found me. Thank God Lucy was with me for the funeral as dad’s  condition got much worse. The office told me to remain as long as I liked but that same night dad died. If Lucy had not been with me I don’t know what I would have done.

I returned to Singapore on September the fourteenth where everyone was very sympathetic. I still had six months to do in Vietnam and the office would not allow wives and husbands to be together in a war zone. But we had worked out a really good ruse. Our parish priest, he who had just buried my parents, smiled on Lucy and me  and married us in the church with Michele and John as witnesses. We were not legally married, but the church thought we were and was happy. So we were. But Lucy had to fly out later than I did. So it was on the fourtheenth of September that a good friend, who held all my mail for me, handed me a letter received some weeks ago. I knew the writing. It was dated September the first,

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“Dear Son

You’ll be upset to hear that that girl Lucy who was chasing after you disgracefully for the year before you went to Asia was killed in a car crash yesterday. She borrowed John’s sports car and could not control it. I believe it took them an hour to cut her out  and she was crying for you as she died while on the way to hospital…..” I vomited as I tore it up. I couldn’t understand it. Which one of us did she hate the most?  When I met Lucy in Saigon Airport a week later I never mentioned it to her. I never have.

Anton Wills-Eve

reply to redwrap’s walking with the Sun

SKY’S RED BUT I’M NOT MOURNING AS MUCH

I’ve just read ‘Walking with the sun on my Face’ in the blog collection ‘Red’s Wrap’. Like many other insatiable word press users I was greatly moved in many different directions by the thoughts that floated through my own mind as I read her ten thoughts for today. So I shall simply say how they affected my memories of my life and my philosophy about the world I live in. I do hope you don’t mind Red, but why else would you have written what you did if not to stir the stew pans of your readers’ mental worlds?

On 1.Sometimes I miss carrying people but it’s nice to swing my arms when I walk and have no worries.

Well three ideas in the first sentence, that suggests a blog of huge proportions but I’ll try not to. The first image that sticks in my mind is the picture of someone walking and swinging their arms but also suggests that doing this erases worries. If only it did life would be so much easier. I know that when I swing my arms when walking I feel vaguely military and that is something which both worries and disturbs me. I think it all depends on whether you are leisurely enjoying your walk, or striding purposefully towards some goal.

The former is fine and is usually fun. The latter just makes me squirm and wish the object of my march would go away. If you think of it which ever way you walk you must be going somewhere. If it is to a place with no worries associated with it you are very fortunate indeed. If a march to a military end then your worries will be many and it may well be the last walk you ever take.

But the opening line really hits me where it hurts. “I miss carrying people.” Oh, lucky you that you ever had that ultimate joy of parent hood. To lift a little one above your head as you skipped along, both of you laughing. How lucky the parents who have done that. I was blessed with four children but I never once was able to pick them up in joyful play or had the playful joy of walking with them swinging in my tightened grasp. My first wife had not long had our daughter, just seven weeks, and although I had kissed her and rocked her in my arms as a baby the tragedy of that day when a mortar hit the hospital where My gorgeous Anh worked and killed both her and baby Gemma on the spot will never leave me. How could it? That was in Saigon in November 1968 where I was working as a journalist.

Four months later a met an English girl in Singapore and she comforted me and gradually restored my shattered sanity to the point where we married in August 1969. By then I was the company’s chief correspondent in Indo-China and my wife soon became pregnant. I could not take the risk of my first loss and when she was six moinths pregnant she returned to my family in England. There she had our son and when he was three months old he was left with my sister as I only had four months of my posting left.

My wife flew back, but the war had moved seriously into Cambodia and in my last week scheduled to work there I was the sole survivor of a helicopter crash. It took a total of three months to patch me up. I had seriously damaged my back and had a bone graft from hip to spine. Naturally When I finally returned to England and was fit enough to resume work I did not have the strength to lift up my little boy. He could come and sit on my knee to be read a story, but that’s not the same as swinging him over my head. And now I shall close my reflections on your first thought with the greatest sadness of my life for which only I was responsible.

In mid-January 1969 after a couple of Pernod’s too many to help control the agoraphobia from which I have suffered all my life but refused to let limit my work or play, I made love to an American journalist and then never saw her again. As foul fate and deserved ill fortune would have it I received a letter from her eight months later to say she was due to have a child in about a month’s time. I was very much in love with my second wife and showed her the letter. She said she understood and it made no difference to our marriage plans. She has hardly mentioned that letter since, but for a very good reason.

The girl with whom I slept, Kathy, married a flame of long standing almost as soon as she returned to the States that same January and never told him about me. He has always assumed his daughter, Gemma, was his own. Kathy told me she remembered I had told her my tragedy and my daughter’s name. Also that I was a Catholic. She said it was the one thing she could do for me, and became a Catholic herself very soon after returning to America. Her husband was not especially bothered one way or the other. Kathy said a mutual friend whom we could both trust, a fellow journalist, would always keep me informed about my daughter when he could.

Now where does the mourning come in again in this first recollection? Well when Gemma was nineteen she married a marine and only nine months later as she was being driven to hospital in haste to have a baby, her husband’s car was in a crash and both he and his wife, my Gemma, were killed. But paramedics performed a miracle and the baby was saved. She is called Jenny, is a very lovely twenty six year old now and I have heard she is hoping to marry this summer. So I never even got to swing my grandchild either. I told our mutual friend that my wife knew everything and understood and to our great surprise last Chistmas, she, not me, got a letter from Kathy asking her to assure me she was mentally fine and had three more children now and was very grateful to God. My wife broke down in tears and showed me the letter. All she said was, “You have a knack of picking really nice people, haven’t you?” Well let’s look at the rest of Red’s thoughts and find out.

2.I had lost touch with how intensely self-conscious my Nicaraguan children sometimes were in places we went as a white family but I am remembering it now and wish I’d really understood what I was seeing when I was seeing it.

This thought requires some background knowledge on what relationship your ‘Nicaraguan children were to you, but in the sense that you talk about it I don’t think it matters. It reads as the wish that you had understood what children of a diferrent ethnic background felt when forced to mix with whites. If I am right I do have a very strong memory of an episode in my life when I had to cover an insurgance in a French west African country.

I was fresh out of University and on my first overseas assignment for the news agency. We lived in Paris and my French was fluent which was why I was chosen for the assignment. Within a day of arriving in the middle of hell I was introduced to a French nurse, a white girl aged about 23 to my 22 so she said she had a really good story for me. She worked in a hospital for blind orphans and it also took in perfectly healthy children who had no idea who their parents were. Well I wrote a well received piece on the hospital and then found myself playing tennis in the street with a few of the other children. Some were really good.

Now just about every country in the world that used to be a colony, especially British or French, had a sports and games club that was tacitly – some overtly- reserved for whites only. I was not aware of this, but on my second night in the country’s capital I was invited to become an honorary member of the Racing Club. When they discovered I was a member, as was my father, of the founding club in Paris, they were all over me and said I could bring any friends of mine with me to enjoy the facilities.

I didn’t know. I wasn’t American or South African I didn’t know what racial segregation actually was. I just knew it was wrong. I was to learn much worse about this aspect of American life in Vietnam. But I digress. Two days later in the early afternoon I approached the club with three unnaturally worried, as I thought, children with tennis rackets. They were of course native coloured children. The concierge looked at me in amazement and asked why I was accompanied by the kids. I told him they were going to play tennis at the club with me. He asked me to wait.

A few minutes later the vice president of the club came up to me and asked if I had read the rules about coloured people not being allowed in the club.

I asked him why, as I was not aware of this rule. He said it was normal, like women not being allowed in Golf clubs in England. As I began to realise that he was serious I asked him if I could come inside to the committee room and told the children to wait outside. The President and two other bloated colonial do-nothings lounging in the armchairs. I asked if the rule was genuine as I had never come across it before in my life. I was assured it was. I was about to tear up my membership card in front of them when I remembered that the special press facilities room was in the club and I could not work if I was not a member. So I just got up, apologised for not reading their inhumane rules and left.

For the rest of my stay I just dodged bullets, played with the kids and helped at the hospital. On the day I was leaving I went into a filled main bar and tore up my membership card in front of them all telling them exactly what I thought of them. One tall and rather self-important man asked me what the children had thought of my efforts to get them access to the courts. I suddenly realised, to my shame, that I had forgotten to ask the most important question of all. Back at the hospital, though, as a leaving present they had bought me a new tennis racket and the friendliest boy said to me” Thank you for trying to help us, monsieur. I fear, however, that you were about fifty years too early.” He understood all right.

3.If there is a God, I think he or she frequently gives people more than they can handle but they survive mostly because they decide to focus on what’s going to happen in the next five minutes.

A lovely idea this one and of course 100 per cent correct. I am a believing, devoutly practising Catholic, but the idea that I focus more on the next five minutes than anything else is spot on. But where I love the underlying idea in this is because ‘I have too much to handle’ is a long way from how I see my faith. Yes I do attend to the immediate, it’s only natural, but if anything were to threaten my religion, like say, military persecution, then that would become my next five minutes. I would attend to it at once.

This is the whole point of my way of viewing God. If you know Him and love Him as I do, then of course he is the most important part of my life. If, however, one finds it impossible to believe in a creator God then he is not so important and other things take precedence. But the lovely bit is never forgetting to pray for people who cannot believe because they have no idea just how much joy and pleasure can be derived from participating in spiritual love.

4. I will never fully understand the concept of forgiveness although I do understand reaching a point of letting go of one’s rage before it becomes lethal.

Well to start with if one does not know what it feels like to love God or even a particular saint, then the feeling you need in order to forgive must be terribly hard to understand. People have often asked me, do you forgive Hitler?. I would much prefer ‘have you forgiven Hitler’, but leave that. Yes I have. It is not my business to forgive or withhold forgiveness from anyone. What I should do is condemn the sin but leave forgiving the sinner to God.But where I can see that this is really hard is when you feel very strongly about something, mass shootings are usually good examples, when you want the perpetrator to be punished but you dont want to forgive them either. Now, if you haven’t got a God to pass the forgiving buck on to then it is up to you. Your solution of not letting your feeling reach the stage where you could hurt some one else is quite correct. You have to draw the line there. But I do think you should also try to see whatever has been done from the point of view of the malfaissant because only then can you start to work out what made them do what they did. And it is important to society to try to find a reason or you won’t stop the next one.

5 Martin Niemoller’s caution still rings true even though we like to see it as historical, an artifact of another time, not this one.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out —

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out —

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

Very famous, I know, very clever but incomplete. He never says why in each case. We are assumed to know, if we know our history, then we can understand the first three, but what about the last one. Who is coming for him and why? I am quite happy to accept that the general idea of the piece is that unless we defend the persecuted and oppressed when they start being oppressed, simply because it’s nothing to do with us, where will persecution end? The simple answer is that depends on who is persecuting and why? But, as I say, in the last line we don’t know so how could we intervene as the writer suggests we should?

The best example in the world today is that of North Korea where the nation is so brain washed everone does everything they are told no matter how insane it may appear.But isn’t that exactly what happens in developped western countries? We’re all free, yippee! Yes we are, to speak our minds, but there democracy ends. And why? Because unless we go along with the financial arrangements put in place by the extreme left and extreme right we could not take home a salary good enough for us to have enjoyable lives. We don’t make or take those decisions we just abide by them.

6 It is a relief not to worry about my children’s happiness but to know that they are happy or happy enough without my planning and tending and that I can fill up that new space with almost anything I choose.

God you’re lucky. No you really are. No matter what age they are if you really no longer have to worry about your children and you are free to spend your time as you like you must be awfully confident that your world is never going to change. There is so much that could be said here, but I’m not going to. If you are as lucky as you say then I’m not going to change it for you. I’ll just pray things stay as good as they are.

7 The boy at the beach on Sunday with long khaki pants and shoes on was like a prisoner I wanted to liberate; I thought why did your parents bring you to this joyous place in a cage?

What an odd thing to think. Your mind is becoming much, much clearer. How do you know that before setting out that afternoon – was it morning? – there was not an almighty row in that household. The boy had just got the latest fashionable, ghastly looking, clothes and could at last ape his friends. He was over the moon at showing off his outfit but his mother told him to change. They went at it hammer and tongs for ages until dad final shouted “We’re wasting the day. For God sake let him go out dressed as Nero if he likes but for heaven’s sake stop this squabbling. The real irony was that he never saw any friends, his parents don’t visit those sort of beaches, and so he was kitted out like an idiot for nothing.

Life is much more interesting in our heads than our eyes.

8 It is wonderful to have someone thank me for a right decision I made about them twenty-five years ago.

What on earth does one say about something that has never happened to them? I was thinking what I was doing 25 years ago, O god yes, got it! Stupid me. On May 7^th 1990 I got my wife pregnant. It was more than twenty one years since we’d had a child and I couldn’t believe it. We were both alternately up in the air or down on our knees. We really could not take it in. She was 43 and I was 48 and my mother in law was petrified that I had killed her daughter. My father in law was delighted for us but a bit apprehensive for his daughter. My own parents had both died very young nearly twenty years earlier, so you can imagine it meant so much to me. We had wanted more children but God just never gave us any and then wow! I’ll never forget how I felt that day.

You’re all getting teed up for a tear jerker aren’t you? No, be honest, after my earlier stuff. But this was one of the greatest stories you could make up, except it happened. When my adorable wife was 23 weeks and four days pregnant and all was going swimmingly God gave us a little reminder that things aren’t always as we expect. Given our ages you can see why I knew the exact length of her pregnancy, when she got appendicitis and it burst. The ambulance crew were staggering but got us to the operating theatre in time. It was two pm in the afternoon and all I was allowed to do was get the Catholic chaplain to the operating table to baptise the baby and give my wife the last rights.They’re great. Much better than medication.

Because thirteen weeks later after my wife had had two operations and nearly died, and my son had struggled to breathe – he still holds his hospital record for survival at 23 weeks and four days back in 1990- for months, we all came home on January 6^th, Epiphany, and my eldest boy had flown back from university in Australia to help all he could. But the youngest went on to be an academic genius with a lst class BSc. honours in physiology, an MA in Archeology of death and memory, and is heading for a doctorate in a year or two. No, of course I hadn’t forgotten all that, it’s just that I can’t remember if my wife said thank you on May the 7^th!

9 ‘I can decide to not let things be more important than the things that are important like working on gun control and racism; there aren’t other people to do this, we are the people’.

Again absolutely spot on. Those are just the sort of things that

the average person should be concerned with and make their voices heard on. I don’t suppose that the Vatican News Service is top of the reading list in your house, but you have almost said exactly the same thing as Pope Francis said in his Letter to the world last week, but he was aimed at preserving the planet and helping the starving and the poor.

He really went for those people who could, and should be doing something about these problems but aren’t for purely selfish reasons. He cited four meetings on global warming and not a thing done. He slammed the countries that let the poor starve in case stopping a civil war might interrupt their oil supply. Then he went for the over fed industrialised countries for ignoring the starving people in the third world. You really should read it it puts the skewer right into the stomachs of the greedy and the lazy.

But the bit I liked best was when he said religious education in catholic scools should be about being the sort of citizens that God needed on this earth rather than just brilliantly clever technocrats and scientists who were destroying the planet instead of preserving it. Great stuff. And as you so rightly say, the sort of document that was not written for the shelf but every school desk.

10 I could not be more grateful for my chance to be on the earth this day and all the days past and maybe tomorrow.

Well taken overall I certainly hope that your days on the earth have still got a long way to go. I have seldom found myself agreeing IN SPIRIT with the ideas of another person who is not known to me, with whom I have never chatted and who wants to do what is right and has the humility to admit that she still has bits to learn to do this. Thanks for the read. It was fun and a great read.

Anton Wills-Eve

The Early Years

how early is early?

EARLY HELL HATH NO FURY

I had some cracking times when I was very young, indeed I think I may have mentioned some in the odd blog. Probably the most exciting event was when I was two and a few months in 1944 when a buzz bomb nearly killed my sister, three years and seven months, and me as my grandmother raced for our house pushing our pram and we just beat the german monster.

Well, obviously, this story gets better every time I tell it but we did get a shock from the explosion and as my mother was very well known at that time she rang a London national  daily and recounted my story, warts and all, even if there weren’t any warts, thus gaining me my first  national byline before I was three. Even at that age I was clearly  paparrazile. I scaled many more non existant peaks in the journalistic world as I grew older and more unreliable, but why tell the truth when the  border line between ‘thou shallt not bear false witness’ gets ever closer and oh, sooooooooooooo much more tempting.

This blog title raises an interesting point. When do our early years stop? Mine went on until I was at least ten so let’s take it to then, you’ll see why in a second or two. But first a lovely recollection from when I was five. We had a gorgeous house (37 rooms and an acre of garden) in south west London between Sheen Common and Richmond Park and the Earl of Kimberly gave my sister and me a lovely thoroughbred golden retreiver Labrador puppy for Chrismas. Well there are a lot of wild deer in Richmond Park and it was a treasonable offence to defend yourself if one attacked you because they belonged to the Queen.

Actually I’ve always found her an adorable poppet of a Queen and by far the best head of state anywhere in the world in my lifetime. Being half Scots I don’t blame her for not being a Stuart. My father was sixth generation Australian, we all have our Crosses to bear! But as I say I cannot believe her majesty would have minded if I had defended my small but heroic frame from a charging stag.  With only a stout branch which I could hardly yield she would have applauded me for lashing out at the beast as it bore down on my sister and me, but sadly such heroism was never put to the test. But what was tested was our Labrador’s metal. When I was five a middle sized sort of  deer did run towards me, but the dog at once charged it and in it’s confusion it fled back into it’s pack of brothers and sisters telling them that it wasn’t a nice doggie at all and to keep away from it under pain of death.  The lovely tagline to this true story is that apparently when I was one year old I was taken to see the Walt Disney film of Bambi and had to be taken out  of the cinema crying and screaming during the forest fire scene. I later grew out of this brief interlude of warriorlesssnesship.

As I have set the time limit of this story on ten ( lets say ten years and 164 days) I will pick out some oustanding memories that have clung to me mind ever since. There was the awful Sunday morning when I was stranded by Hammersmith bridge and my mother and sister caught the bus leaving me behind. As I gradually blanched into panic driven horror of the first realisation of just how terrible my agoraphobia was going to be for the rest of my life I did also learn, in the short passage of terror the inescapable minutes trapped me in,that I either had to fight it or live in mortal mental fear for ever. I chose the former and was just about able to manage, with the help of pills, prayers and Pernod, and a saint who has carried me over more crises both mental and spiritual than you could imagine. But in truth I have been unbelieveably lucky. Especially having a wife who understands my awful illness completely Not least because she sufferes from it too, and has done all her life, thus being able to empathise with me.

I think my two main memories of early school life were loving all sports at which I was fortunate enough to excel. Can you imagine a ten year old playing cricket and doing really well for the school under elevens side thanks to nearly half a bottle of scotch he had to drink to manage to cross the cicket field! The other memory was what I called the unneccessary side. If we did anything even vaguely contrary to the school rules it was an unmerciful thrashing with a leather strop and no excuses allowed. I was regularly given this punishment for not doing things which I could not manage because of the limitations of my phobia. For instance I could not do a cross country run – well who could with that illness. And then the awful added anxiety of waiting for three days before going into the headmaster’s study to be punished for being too ill to run. At that age it was on the hand, but hurt just as much, and always on the hand with which you did not have to write. I remember getting thoroughly fed up with this senseless torture when I was nine and holding out my right hand and saying to the master,

“Look Sir you use your left hand to hit me and we’ll see who comes out of the contest best”. He did not have a clue if I was being impertinent or genuinely trying to crack a joke. He smiled and said, sorry this isn’t negotiable. Following this I pulled my left hand from behind my back and said, sorry Sir, but I fell off my bike yesterday evening and I’ve broken four fingers. You can’t hit that one.” He stared,  put the strop away and smiled, ‘okay we’ll make that your punishment for a couple of weeks’ he smiled. But I finally had him. “No Sir, That’s the last time you’ll ever hit me. I told the doctor the injury was the result of the ferocity with which we were thrashed at school. My father is taking no action, much as the doctor wanted him to, but he will if you ever touch me again. Nobody did hit me for two years, so I had managed to stop that double torture without the family knowing about my phobia. But my father’s added condition was that no boys in the school aged under twelve should rceive any form of corporal punishment, and as he was a well known journalist they did not argue with him and the rule he demanded was brought in.

But I said earlier that I would like to end these memoirs on a pleasant note, and they don’t come pleasanter than Anne. It was at my tenth bithrday party that we all played hide and seek in my garden. About ten boys and ten girls from near where we lived came to tea and games at our house. May is a lovely month for a birthday, and Anne had been at the first infants’ school with me from the age of four to nearly eight. We had not seen a lot of each other since we changed schools, but at that party Anne seemed strangely shy and even a little upset. During hide and seek I partnered her and knew a perferct spot behind the orchard where no one would find us. I smiled at her deliberately affectionately, “Now what’s got into you since I saw you last, Anne. It can’t be just missing me.” A tear ran down her cheek as she answered.

“Oh, Anton. It’s not that. At our age life has not even started, no we are moving to the South coast, near Brighton, and I’ll be a long, long way away from you.”Amid sniffles she added,”I promised myself I would not spoil your birthday, but I shall be good from now on.  I looked round, saw nobody could see us and placed my hands on Anne’s shoulders and gave her the softest kiss I think I’ve ever given anyone. Then I said, “I agree with you we are too young to be in love as grown ups are, but I promise you this, my Anne. I love you more that anyone I know and I hope I always will. So please just keep writing to me and as we get older we may get to love each other more every day.”

She said nothing. Anne just put her arms round my neck and returned my kiss with ten times the love I had given her. She hung onto me for five minutes,  wiped her eyes and completed the promise to write and never lose touch. And is that what happened?

Well this is just the early years. Anne stayed very close to me until they moved six months later and I went down to Brighton with my sister to see her the next April. But if you want to know what happened to Anne, whether I was corporally punished again, how I got round my phobia to play several games I loved. and the limitations placed on the rest of my life, I’m afraid you’ll have to read the book.

Anton W-E

<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/tagline/”>Tagline</a&gt;

to tag or not to tag, that has almost nothing to do with this question

A COWARD’S BRIEF ENCOUNTER

This earthly life in which I spend all my time is not even a drop in the ocean of eternity. So how can I measure the tidal rise and fall of Heaven’s boundaries due to my existence if it has neither physical nor temporal limits? This question is what theologians call a supernatural mystery, atheists call a cop out, and people like me, who love God, his saints and his sinners, are happy not to call anything at all. I give my existence no name, I just live it. But what fun to be asked to give it a tagline, particularly if I have I to be honest as well! You can see what I have chosen; would you like to know why?

For me the most important quality a man should have, and one which I lack in so many different ways, is courage. Courage to do what I instinctively know I ought to do no matter how difficult, apparently painful or mentally depressing. But why should I impose such conduct upon myself when I have freewill and do not need to display valour whenever it is called for? Quite simply because when others are in need, and by being courageous I could help them, then I would not think much of myself if I just ignored them. This is no attempt to be holier than thou or the saviour of my nation or the rescuer of my loved ones. No it is nothing like that. It is trying to find the guts to live with myself when I know what a basically selfish bastard I so often am. I look for excuses, but there are none. Reasons, oh yes there are always reasons for not facing up to fear for the sake of others when one should, but excuses? I don’t think so. I want to be explicit here.

In many blogs I have discussed an illness from which I have suffered all my life. It crucifies me and I hate it, yet I still blame myself for not having overcome it. No, I merely find devious, dishonest and dangerous ways round it and above all use it as my excuse for being what I have called myself, a coward. In case you haven’t the faintest idea what I am getting at let me explain that I have suffered from a terrible anxiety neurosis for as much of my life as I can remember. It takes the form of a phobic panic when confronted by nothing at all. Open  spaces with nobody in them; oceans, I cannot swim; streets of closed shops from which I cannot escape and worst of all crowded stadiums and public meetings  in which I cannot find any way out from the irrational fear of not being able to control my movements. This in turn reduces me to breathless, perspiring fits of  a feeling I can’t describe, only the way the symptoms torture me. I invariably try to run away, anywhere, until exhausted I either reach a sanctuary or quite simply faint and am helped by some kind passer by. But earlier I referred to the ways I get round this awful phobia. I call my method of defnding my sanity, “The three P’s”

Briefly this is an acronym for Pills, Prayers and Pernod.  For the past 48 years I have been on a daily dose of benzodiazapine tranquilisers which would knock most people out if they took only ten per cent of the dose I need. The prayers I say every day and night are a mixture of begging God and one saint in particular to release me from the daily prospect of being reduced to a frightened mental wreck. But I also know that I don’t deserve to be spared this ordeal and they help me accept this, and even cheer me up when I am at my lowest ebb. And the final P? well if you drink a bottle of Pernod a day it does help keep you full of false courage, at least enough to struggle through the horrors that confront you. But if I really am this ill why do I call myself a coward?

Cowardice is the failure to do what  we should because the prospect scares us in some way, I have said this before. But in the case of an irrational fear it follows that I should be able to face up to the stupidity of my nonsensical phobia and behave like everyone else. Like a normal person. But for some reason I can’t. Why can I not walk by myself to the end of the street in which I live when it is only some eighty yards away? I don’t know. I can do it if I have someone, my wife for instance, to hang onto who knows what I am suffering and can help me. But even this does not always work. And why have I had it all my life? It has stopped me doing many, many things I enjoy so it is not some subconcious way of getting out of things I don’t want to do. I had to give up golf and cricket before I was eighteen because the fields and courses were simply unmanageable. Heavens know what the masters at my school would have done if they had known I was drinking half a bottle of scotch immediately before a match when playing cricket for the school, and this at the age of thirteen! But illnesses such as mine make you behave in some very odd ways. I loved travelling and my career as a journalist, especially as a war correspondent, but the company never knew what I was fighting. It was never a part of the war I was there to observe. No My pills, prayers and Pernod kept me going for three years and more in Vietnam and Cambodia when I could hardly cross the road in some places.  It was also an expensive way to live. I mean I had to take taxis everywhere I went, but I never told anybody. I loved my work too much.

But there is a limit to how long one can keep this up. I was warned by a doctor whom I consulted in London at considerable expense why no cure for my illness was known. He said it was but depended on the patient. In my case he told me I had settled for living with it and handling it as best I could, and I was either deliberately or subconsciously refusing to let other people, doctors especially, interfere in how I treated myself. I told him I did not agree with him, told him I would never wish the illness on my worst enemy and that in short he was the one who had made up his mind about what could or could not be done for me and refused to take any notice of me at all. That is where we left it. But at what cost?

Firstly at the cost of the happiness of at least four people who suffered terribly from being excluded from my life, and by me too. That hurt. It really did. I have never forgiven myself for what I did to them and I never will, but was I being a coward? I thought so at the time, but I also had a reason in each case for doing what I did. A girl I had wanted to marry for 16 years, since she was nine, I finally had to tell I could not see again. Why? She thought it was because I didn’t love her. I thought it was because to inflict someone with my illness on her for the rest of her life would have been downright cruel. I would have been spending half my income on just paying for ways round my phobia instead of looking after any family we so dreadfully wanted to have. That was cowardice, or was it?  Without going into details I can say now, 41 years after I last saw her, that her life would have been far, far happier if we had stayed together. We still keep in touch. But anyone who hurt someone like I hurt her deserves to end up as I have. The others were less dramatic partings, but severed ties of love and affection that I still dream about in nightmares you couldn’t think up. I got what I deserved with one exception. I fell in love with my wife of forty years now and have loved her for every minute of our marriage.

But read the tag again. I may have explained the ‘coward’ part but why would I tag my life a brief encounter? Simply this. All our lives, whatever we believe, are incredibly brief while on earth. But if we are then loved by God for ever, and in a paradise that we cannot even start to imagine, we are not just fortunate but also know we are eternally loved. So you see I would tag my life on earth as I have, and for the reasons I have, but the next life is one I could never, never tag. Why? Well if I ended up seeing again all those people I hurt, I would also see them happy. I would be so overjoyed I would not know how to describe God’s ultimate gift to me as he forgave me. It is worth going through the hell I have seen for that, though while others on earth still suffer because of me I can only accept the price of my awful pain and terrible illnesss. Maybe that is why ‘a coward’s brief encounter’ was actually necessary in my case. But, as I was not the one who gave me my phobia in the first place, I’m afraid that doctor was completely and utterly wrong!

AWE