www.pasdelabas.org

We went on a walk. A mythical walk. One of those wonderful meaningful and completely fortuitous series of events which are the very nature of embodied ritual, religious life and yet have no meaning at all. It’s just the story.

Gaetan, Claude Califano’s father, who had been a keen walker on his retirement, had given me some photocopies of walking instructions and maps for a few local excursions we might do with the children in the Ardeche. I chose one of them largely because it was close by and because it ended or rather the midpoint of the walk, was at the location of some very ancient dolmens, 6000 years old, registered historical monuments.

Our route involved are driving up a particular road, parking at a particular bend, following under a bridge a small stream down to a larger stream, bearing right along the stream bed past some pools to a spring and then finding the dolmens on the hillside to the left. Everything seemed fairly straightforward and we drove up the road until we reached the particular curve in the road and we parked the car. We followed the instructions to the letter and I did my best to follow it on the map although I was quite uncomfortable with the relation between the walk and the map. Saskia was very uncomfortable with it as well and neither of us could understand why we were having to fight our way is too thick undergrowth getting scratched and seemingly unable to find a path on a walk which had been recommended to us by a man who knew the area so well. It was a real struggle to get through this undergrowth with great thorns literally tearing at our clothes. There was something ominous and dark about the bushes around us and we found ourselves confronted with some extraordinary sights of wildly exotic spiders and crickets the size of locusts. We made our way down the first stream, more or less, we joined the second stream and made our way down to a rather muddy and boggy area which clearly had a spring underneath it. We turned left and found no Dolmen but found ourself faced with some sort of chainmail fencing encasing presumably an area of private hunting. Things were wrong. The children were hot and tired and everyone was irritable and argumentative. Lottie was beside herself with anxiety from the presence of so many spiders. It was clear that this was not right. I persuaded everybody that things would be fine and returned to the car driving down to meet them and pick them up on the roadside.

We continued in the car further up the road and it was obvious that we had taken the wrong bridge and the wrong stream. We followed more carefully this time and found ourselves to larger bend in the road with a small car park where we expected it to be. We parked and we walked around under the bridge a little easier this time although still the past did not seem completely clear and then it becomes slightly narrower and increasingly our anxiety tells us that is this perhaps wrong once again? The path weaved down through increasingly steep dry riverbed’s with rocks which we turn around. And then our smaller stream joins a larger high walled riverbed. So high walled that there are cliffs practically on one side. We follow the river bed down and had a vision of some sort of turquoise light which as we approach it becomes limpid pool of water.

Everybody is excited and thrilled. We hear bee eaters coasting through the sky above us. Short toed eagles glide through the sky above. There are many of these turquoise pools as we make our way down the dry riverbed. With reeds on the sides they are teeming with life. Frogs jump into them as we approach, strange bizarre larvae wriggle along the sands at the bottom of the water. Everyone is completely engrossed in the beauty of nature and the children are realising that they are actually walking through the closest thing any of them have ever seen to completely magical fairyland.

They begin to gather things into some sort of collection with a fantasy of making a film about a fairyland. Little acorns perhaps. Small stones that look like kettles. Past more pools walking over rocks watching out for frogs disturbing tadpoles dragonflies landing here and there. And through these astonishing pools we find ourselves coming down to hear a gushing spring and there in the crook of the dry riverbed water is pouring out of a crevice in the rock and we realise we’ve reached the bend where we should turn to the left. We climb a ledge and their straight in front of us not 30 yards from the Springs sits a dolmen that looks as if it was only built yesterday. Made of three large stones to set on their side and the third making the top. They were formed from the local limestone and were bright white. It was really hard to imagine that they were actually that all.

The first one stands not 30 yards from the dry riverbed we walked up to it and then behind it we walked up to the second another 30 or 40 yards behind it equally beautiful and perfect condition. We didn’t go any further but beyond this the spur of land climbed about 300 feet and carried the remains of another four or five Dolmens which had largely collapsed. From an archaeological perspective I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a clear set of ritual monuments in my life so clearly related to the position of the spring.

So they were quite clearly our ritual monuments as well and our movement down through the Wonderland of the pools to find them. It’s just so happens that I had decided to give the children are present that day. I wanted to wait until we got to the Dolmen to give it to them which I did. Ella made a funny joke when we finally got there saying that she was “really looking forward to getting a Lego figure!” But that wasn’t actually the present. I gave them each a small opinel penknife. They were really thrilled and I had wanted to give a properly sharp implement to them in an appropriately significant spot. They got to use their knife immediately because I had brought with me a sausisson which each of us sliced and de-skinned ourselves. The wonderful moments continued as I explained to the children how much care they needed to take with these sharp knives. Cutting carefully my own slice I nicked my thumb which promptly started to bleed and, just for the beauty of a pointless record, my blood dripped down and fell on the top stone of the lowest Dolmen near to the spring.

When something is right it is right. This journey was one of those.

Charles Henry Neal was killed on the front line in Ypres on 21 January 1916. He was my paternal great-grandfather.

I never heard anyone talk about him because nobody I have met even knew him. My grandfather would have been only four or five when he went off to war and never returned. My great uncles, I never met any of them, whether this was through family disputes or just through people moving around I can’t say. My great-grandmother remarried after the First World War. She had a think six or seven children from her marriage to Charles and, as my mother said, it was difficult for a woman to find a man who could look after her. It was difficult to find a man who would “take her on” with so many children and of course fewer men as so many had died during the war. She found herself excepting a marriage proposal, perhaps nothing more than a marriage of convenience and even exploitation. The man she remarried, his name I don’t even know. There is a photograph of him walking along with my grandmother.

He looks like an actor dressed up as an evil character in a silent movie. And it was not for nothing that he chose to look or rather came to look like that. The stories that came down through my grandfather were that he was an evil and sadistic man. He frequently had resort to “the belt” and in my grandfather’s house the children were not allowed to sit down to eat at table until they were able to provide enough money to buy their own food. He was unkind and vicious towards both his wife and the children he inherited. There is some sort of explanation for this in that he had been I think something like a regimental drill sergeant in the First World War himself and had presumably seen and gone through some very unpleasant situations apart from those which he created himself.

So Charles Henry Neal lay in a grave at Ypres from 1916 to this day. I know that my grandfather Alphonso Neal, did visit his father’s war grave when he was an old man but I never had the opportunity or perhaps the interest to speak to him about this. My father has never visited this grave. At the end of the one-month holiday we have just taken as a family in France we decided to visit Ypres and find his grave. I instigated this not just out of a sentimental attachment but also as a way of introducing the children to their connection to the events of the First World War. Unlike me who grew up with parents and grandparents who had both been involved either as children or in active service or as isolated mothers in both world wars, my children, fortunately, have grown up with no stories of the war other than my fathers stuttered memories of fear and loss in the London bombings in World War II.

I don’t and didn’t want to frighten the children or to make them have to think about blood and gore and dirt and dismembered bodies. However I did want them to realise when they discussed the First World War in their school lessons which they will be doing for the next few years due to the centenary, that they had a direct connection back to these events.

We arrived in Ypres and booked into a hotel some 15 miles south on the north edge of Lille. I knew that every evening at 8 o’clock the last post was played under the Menin Gate and so we set off in the car to try and catch this. For a variety of reasons we arrived in the town just too late to find a way to the Menin Gate but we arrived in the main square to find it practically deserted. There was a very sombre atmosphere in that town something I associated with Flemish towns rather than the specific character of Ypres itself. The cafes were largely empty and there was silence unusual for such a large town. And then slowly people began to filter into the main square walking down from the service at the memorial which we had just missed. Several hundreds of people strolling quietly and sombrely back from hearing the last post and going into restaurants or climbing into cars and driving quietly away. Our children were not really aware of the nature of this event and were excited, tired and hungry. They were babbling and running around and shouting and doing everything against the sort of public propriety which is characteristic of Flemish towns in general and, from this experience, Ypres in particular. We felt like sores on the face of the town, blotches.

It always surprises me quite how Protestant the Flemish Catholics are! Quiet and industrious the place feels like an ideal Protestant town yet the religious nature of Flanders is one of a very Spanish and macabre Catholicism. Eventually we managed to feed our children and returned to the town the following day and took our bicycles to ride and find the cemetery where the children’s great-great-grandfather was buried. This was enjoyable and we found his grave. It’s not a big cemetery where he is buried. It carries maybe 1000 graves. Each one a clean hard limestone looking as if it had been sandblasted clean that very day. The grass between the rows of tombstones was neatly cut and small bunches of herbs of flowers had been planted in front of every grave. It was beautifully .kempt. The tombstones were quite small, probably only a couple of feet high and carrying a very plain inscription of the name, the regimental symbol and the date of his death.

It made me realise quite how important memory was within the military. At the Menin Gate I was struck by a list of activities that were taking place each day. Groups were coming from England, the following day the boy’s choir from Camborne in Cornwall would be there, in order to celebrate every evening the last post and remember those who died in the great War. Naïvely I realised that the military and other organisations had funding available to allow and to encourage groups to come and take part in the celebrations. Teams of people either of military’s civic origin whose responsibility it was to keep them clean to keep them tidy and in order. I saw the description written on the Internet of the regiment in which my great grandfather served, the Buffs, where it was mentioned that they had been active in the third Afghan war. Suddenly it strikes me that the current one has been perhaps the fourth floor was at the fifth Afghan war? Was the recent war in Iraq the fourth Iraq war? The regiments have long memories and the military has long memories. The Buffs were originally a private regiment controlled by the particular member of the British aristocracy who eventually agreed to join with the wider United British Army. That is remembered in their regimental history. This particular regiments no longer exists but has its place within a larger regimental unit. But the memory is still there. When you look at the names of the commanders of the regiment you see names of families that are still active and powerful in politics today. Realising that the British aristocracy is tied so intensely and integrally to the order of the British military regime makes you realise how powerful and deep-seated is their power. How intensely ingrained the class system is into the functioning of a state which in the last resort maintains itself through military power.

And then the simple fact of being tidy. Of respecting the dead. My second cousin David has seen active service in Afghanistan. He is not dead but if he were how else could this be explained unless it was within the long trajectory of service, honour, death and all of these things made physical through the maintenance of graves. In fact in a family like mine, one with no great glory, no great power, my great grandfather’s grave sitting in a small cemetery just outside the centre of Ypres, is the oldest place to which I can turn to look at my family. The military give me that. And to those still in service it is the physical proof that there is honour in death on the battlefield. Having been brought up in the generation that reviled the First World War so profoundly, it is very uncomfortable to have these thoughts, to somehow think that to die in a foreign field might not be the worst thing in the world. So very very confusing.

My children enjoyed themselves in the cemetery. They were excited to find the grave like some sort of treasure hunt and stood reasonably dutifully to have photographs taken. And then they played and ran around and did somersaults and tried to pick flowers and argued and shouted and pushed each other. They climbed on the war memorial so they could stand up high with some sort of cross probably standing behind their heads. A part of me was shouting at them that they should somehow be more respectful as if they should hold their hands and keep their heads down. I saw quiet families moving through the town of the. Fathers perhaps who had been in the military. Their children well behaved, small girls with overcoats that were buttoned up, almost Edwardian children, walking along quietly and asking concerned questions to their father. And my children moved around noisily and in an unambiguous fashion did not think to show the quiet respect that this sort of order requires a view. Yet the other part of me looked at them laughing and thought that for my great-grandfather, who had no control over the circumstances which led to his own death, no responsibility in the occurrence of the war which killed him, what could perhaps be better than to have his great-grandchildren laughing above his body on this green grass.

I did not like the sombre atmosphere in Ypres but it did make it into some sort of giant church. The whole city feeling like a memorial. Shops selling souvenirs recalling the First World War. A artist installed in one of the buildings offering to make drawings of your deceased ancestor in First World War uniform. Shops selling items rescued from the fields of battle surrounding the city. And then the whole city itself like some sort of organic and wildly imaginative organic Lego set. The photographs that were attached to some of the memorials reminded me of the total destruction of the city of Ypres during the war. Yet brick by brick the buildings were rebuilt until you look at it and it’s almost impossible to imagine it had ever been destroyed. With Ella we looked at the buildings and this peaked even her interest. The vastness of the town Hall. The intricate work of a mediaeval fashion that had been reconstructed to the most minor detail.

It made me sad to think how we in Britain have been unable, following World War II, to reconstruct any of our cities in this fashion. It also made me sad because it felt that the city was some sort of two as well in itself. That is it been reconstructed, sandblasted to look clean and under it lay so many dead bodies. The great fear being that it would once again see such destruction.

Enough. That war is over. Another war came. And we live in the midst of the perpetual war.

The situation that is developing in the Ukraine is of course profoundly disturbing. What I am finding most disturbing however is the attitude not of Russia but of the Western powers and the European Union. The Ukraine is not a nation state like say for example France, with a very long history of struggle to establish itself, a complicated education system enforcing linguistic unity etc. It is a comparatively recent political construction and the existence of the Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union does not have some sort of long term validity which needs to be protected by war.

There are so many telling events at the moment. For example refugees leaving the war zones in eastern Ukraine, well not officially yet war zones, are heading eastwards largely into Russia. Clearly that is where they feel safer. The Ukrainian government, perceived by the Western media as the “good guy” in this current situation, has insisted on resorting to military conflict in order to re-establish its control of the eastern cities which have so-called Russian separatists operating within them. At no point does any voice in the mainstream Western media raise the question of whether or not the Ukraine should be doing this? Why not allow ethnically Russian groups of people stapled on to the Ukrainian state, to secede? Why not?

Yes of course, it would be so much better, wouldn’t it, if Russia were to encourage them to do this through what we might call legal, in other words non-militaristic means. However what chance of success would that actually have? And there is something called a fait accompli, the eastern regions are in open revolt against the central Kiev government, they are being assisted by Russian soldiers, perhaps “on holiday” as Putin and others have said, perhaps encouraged by the elements of the Russian military who are involved in that region. However these groups are in open armed revolt and already thousands of people are dying and hundreds of thousands being made into refugees. Why not open the debate from the West’s perspective of allowing these areas to join either Russia or to become independent states next to Russia. Nobody raises this issue. It has become so quickly accepted that “war” might take place.

Even a mainstream newspaper like the Guardian, is finding itself carrying stories talking almost in passing about the increasing possibility of a European war. At what point did this become possible. American senators are trying to vote to increase arms aid to the Ukraine. When the Ukraine raises the issue of wanting to join NATO, instead of the West reacting by saying “you’ve got to be joking, you can’t join NATO when you’re about to launch into some sort of war with Russia”, the West and the Western media, the politicians, respond as if somehow this was a sensible reaction. Why would we want to ally ourselves immediately with a country about to instigate some sort of war with Russia?

I can see that from the perspective of the Ukrainian state what is happening in the eastern part of the country is clearly a sort of assisted invasion, not dissimilar I supposed to the sorts of political events that took place in countries in South America with the aid of American money. However the West did not think it a good idea to start a global conflict or at the very least a European conflict to protect the rights of Guatemala or Colombia. Yet it is now becoming possible that this is some way feasible in order to maintain the integrity of a state which has no particular reason to remain a state in that particular formation.

Indeed America and the Western European powers have worked together to dismantle states in the Middle East and North Africa with absolutely disastrous outcomes. But this doesn’t mean that all of a sudden it’s a good idea to fight to maintain a state on our own borders when it may be the maintenance of the state in this particular instance which brings about disaster. Imagine a situation in which the eastern part of the Ukraine was allowed to secede from the main body of the Ukrainian state. It is not difficult to imagine that this would cause suffering and possibly require the relocation of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Ukrainians frightened to live within the Russian direct sphere of influence. The Ukrainian people may not feel protected by the Russians and would it be so awful to consider accepting their relocation? Many many people were relocated following the Second World War. How many people are being forced to become refugees in Syria that moment? How many people are relocating from Africa at the moment? It is not as if this is somehow something that cannot be countenanced. Our attitude is often that it is just “natural”. Surely it is better to strategically encourage such an event rather than to risk launching into some sort of conflict with a far more dangerous and unstable outcome.

Yet the Western powers, the newspapers, all voices in the mainstream media, continue to speak as if Russia was the evil enemy. At no point do they countenance the possibility that from the Russian perspective things might actually look different? They might actually look slightly different from the other side. The only possibility that is being considered is that the Russians are straightforwardly lying about things. What is absolutely evident from the current circumstance is that we too are completely lying about what is going on.

I am not generally given to nor particularly tolerant of conspiracy theories. And I don’t think that in this particular instance I feel the term conspiracy accurately reflects what is happening. However the ease with which the Western world is considering confronting this particular set of events in the Ukraine with a possible NATO response, leaves me with no other way to understand this other than seeing the events as part of some strategy of which I am completely unaware. It seems to be a strategy whereby this war serves some purpose to somebody and as is often said, follow the money, where is the benefit and to whom.

My first thought was that it must be related to energy consumption. By considers that the West may have some long-term strategic interest in making it more difficult to access Russian supplies of gas. If it became politically possible to close down those supply routes it would make political consensus in favour of fracking in Western Europe far easier to push through the political system. It will not be an easy route to bring around large-scale extraction of gas reserves through fracking when it is possible to source cheaper gas from Russia. If that supply line were to be closed down due to setting up a new form of Cold War then it would be hard to resist.

A friend of mine suggested that fracking had an involvement in this in the sense that eastern Ukraine itself was a site of natural resources of value to the West. He told me that mining companies already had bought the rights to fracking in the eastern Ukraine and even suggested that one of the directors of one of these companies was the son of Joe Biden.

Who benefits? It leaves you nothing other than paranoid in a sense. I imagine Western Europe as some sort of sore thumb in the world order. This old small peninsula packed full of self righteous nations with long histories who have sown so much disorder into the wider world. Maybe the superpowers of Russia, the United States and China might find things easier if Western Europe was simply crushed. Maybe some sort of long-term plan to reduce the political independence of Western European countries through encouraging Russia to become more aggressive and silence the annoying voices of these multiple children. Babbling voices.

I know very little but I have a profound sense of knowing practically nothing. I talked about this with my friend Ben Graves. We discussed what sort of mechanisms might actually lead to events like this. How old do conversations in corridors of power or discussions in restaurants lead to the silence from the mainstream media. It is almost as if some sort of fatwa has been pronounced and everybody is going along with it. Nobody wants to break ranks and say “hold on, this is ridiculous, you can’t do that”. What might bring about such a fatwa? Is this something related to the automatically regulated citizen? That’s nobody even thinks to say these things? Is it that the liberal left still hope that the world really is not in the control of huge corporations? That people really believe in the potential of democracy to produce anything other than ruling and self reproducing elites? It is a profoundly depressing set of events taking place. Rather like suddenly realising that there is abuse taking place in your neighbour’s house. Despite appearing charming when you talk to them at the front door.

So – a few days here and there feeling depressed at not having achieved anything of note – nothing special there – and there’s the rub. Nothing special. I’ve always found it difficult accepting being like everyone else. So, in this instance, I rationalise myself, my view of myself as someone who’s not bad, as a palimpsest. I’ve a set of things I do and have done and each one is nothing of great note but I’m at least an interesting complex of over-writings.

The terrible war in Gaza is taking place as I write with yet another cease fire ending with ceaseless fire. My question to myself is what is it not to take a position against Israel despite the clear case for one. Although the case is clear and there is a strong popular voice to support Palestinians politically the Israel remains inviolate. Still I feel uncomfortable with the voices that call for the demonisation of Israel. I’m not even Jewish but I feel that in taking this position of not condemning I am opening myself to agression. I remain uncomfortable with the ease with which Jewishness and Israel are confounded and fearful of the repercusssions. It is rather similar to the position my mother took before her death vis a vis the war in Iraq which she couldn’t bring herself to repudiate. Confusion and discomfort with the popularism of the call to abandon Israel. I keep this to myself by and large.

I found a mechanic to repair the brakes on a couple of the bikes we have with us on this extended visit to France. The man running the shop in Marignane was born in Brittany, near Rennes. He’d been living in Paris until 1969 when he moved down south following his father’s work. “You’re a 68er” I teased…

Don’t be fooled by what they say about ’68. I was there at the time. I remember being on the boulevards when according to the newsreels it was all riots and revolution. Well – I could see the CRS on the other side of the road and the cameras, well they filmed it from a certain angle to make it look like a huge crowd, but really, it wasn’t like they said. Well, things did change after that. It was the beginning of the great mess. The beginning of the end.

“Well” I replied, “there had been a bit of a mess a few years before… the war and all that”.

Kaius has accompanied me a few times for an early morning visit to a bar/café where I’ve had coffee and he hot chocolate. This morning we were sitting at a table inside a bar in Ensues La Redonne and Kai pointed this out to me:

Dad, every time we’ve gone into a bar there have been men inside and also a man has come in and kissed a woman who is behind the bar.

So we are staying in a villa in the commune of Ensues La Redonne which lies 10 miles to the south-west of Marseille on a stretch of coast known as the Blue Coast. The Coast forms part of an area known as Les Calenques, the more famous area carrying that name lies south and south-east of Marseille. It is an area of coast where the cliffs abut directly onto the water, access is very difficult to the sea and it is in the Calenques, small sheltered coves, that villages have grown up around small fishing ports. The area is reminiscent of the Cinque Terre in Liguria several hundred kilometres further to the east beyond Genova. Road access to the villages by the sea involve steep descents and a railway line runs the length of the coast through tunnels and over viaducts.

We have rented a villa through one of these on line not quite standard rental agencies, where individual householders advertise their personal properties for rent. There is quite a Hoo Haa in France at the moment with this system as this can become effectively a way of avoiding paying the complicated set of taxes to which officially declared tourist operations are subject. So we are renting our house from a family who appear to have vacated it for the period. There are a variety of issues that we are facing in this respect, particularly concerning insurance and the oddity of paying a lot of money for somewhere that doesn’t actually provide certain basics. Anyhow, these are not the subject of this note, generally the place is lovely with a really nice swimming pool and a series of ground floor living areas and a kitchen which are cool. Always needing some sort of hobby with which to distract myself I am engaged in an intense cooking exercise, perhaps more on that later.

So I knew nothing at all about this area before coming here. Of course I have heard of Marseille and slept once outside Marseille Central Station, St Charles I believe it is called. This must have been in 1980 perhaps even 1979. I would have been travelling the south coast busking in the resort towns. What I remember about that night at the station was that I slept in a sleeping bag and tied, as was my wont at the time, my guitar to my feet or arms. However what happened that particular night which never happened before or since is that when I woke up in the morning to put on my shoes, they were probably Clark’s desert boots, all the rage in Italy at the time, I found a scorpion in one of them. So apart from scorpions I know Marseille to be a lively, fast, energetic, busy, ethnically mixed, left-wing, Mediterranean melting pot. The coast however, in contrast to the extensive areas of poverty with which I associate areas of Marseille at least, I associated entirely with wealth. Cannes, Nice, Menton, the Cote d’Azur.

However this area of coast has completely confounded my expectations. The commune in which we are located is a Communist commune. Prior to that socialist. There are no obvious elements of touristic infrastructure. There are no other foreign visitors here on holiday or so few that I have yet to encounter them when going to the shops. All the cars are locally registered that I have noticed. Inside the bars and in the shops I feel that I am in a working-class area and more distanced from the sort of impact I associate with tourism and Anglophone “leisure migration” than I can remember for many years.

In a very telling episode the 5 children, Saskia and Wendy walked down from our villa to the small port at the bottom of the hill, a steep walk past the station. They were looking for somewhere to take the children swimming in the sea. They found two small gravelly beaches. When they came back there was a distasteful discourse in respect to that seaside settlement. It was described as scruffy, the people as slightly rough. A nasty block of flats was near the beach area and it was not that clean.

I think the element of proper snobbish commentary is clear. I, perhaps in my reverse snobbism, found those very elements refreshing. It is such a relief to be in an area of the Mediterranean with beautiful clear waters in a wonderful bright blue landscape which has not been colonised by the bourgeoisie. Where in fact people usually consigned to estates at the back of coastal towns, live with views over the open sea. In some ways it has reminded me of the sorts of places you get in the North East of England, areas like North and South Shields, where working cities occupy the coastal strips. Somehow I didn’t expect to find this any longer in the French Mediterranean.

Why it is like this, I hesitate to guess, but it may have something to do with the heavily industrial nature of this area. To the east lies Marseille and beyond that the city of Toulon, a major military port amongst other things. To the west lies the Camargue, which while it is a huge expanse of Marshland, also houses vast areas of salts pans which produces a very complicated industrial landscape. There is also a power station some 20 km up the coast and various industrial offshoots that sits near the canal of the Rhône which reaches the sea in the Camargue. To the north lies a very extensive inland lagoon surrounded by manufacturing, light industry, storage depots and the airport. So whilst this area, the blue Coast, is pretty and the water pristine, it sits in a sense as a backwater to the industrial hinterland.

So, quite the discovery. However potentially not the most comfortable place to be without a strong command of French. I don’t know if this is the case yet, but certainly the interactions I have had in local shops and bars have not been straightforward. People are surprised to find what is evidently some sort of tourist present.

Patrick Duggan died several weeks ago now. For a variety of reasons I have taken on the task of boxing up items in the house which are not wanted by either of his cousins know by the Scout Association. I have found this tiring and taxing emotionally. Patrick is not my family and I know very little but the reference points of his life are, obviously, recognisable to me as we are both British. He died at the age of 76 always having lived with his mother and being an only child. He had lived in the house here on Holtwood since 1952 and before that down at the bottom of the hill on Atlas Street, in an area of housing above the steelworks now completely demolished. This family, Irish at least on his father’s side, had lived in the area since the 1890s at least. The house was full of bits and pieces that dated from this period onwards. They had been what my mother called respectable working-class. Even back in the pre-First World War days they had a small haulage business, which meant they must have owned a flatbed trailer and a horse. Patrick had a very good memory and I know that he knew many of the stories that link together the vast number of photographs and odd bits of paper and records and ornaments which lie around the house. Without his knowledge, and there is nobody really to put it all together, the items begin to lose any coherence at all. This has happened to so many people’s objects as is evidenced by the clutter found all over junk shops and of course in antique shops as well. So it is annoying in some way to have to pack all these things up and make decisions that pull things out of context and put them into a new set of relations, those that live set up, things that I bolted together.

Saskia had said to me maybe you could keep some for Abbeyfield House? She had been particularly moved by the collection of old toys which had been kept. She wanted some sort of memory box connected to Patrick. I don’t like the idea particularly of commemorating him like this. Fran, from down the road, she too had suggested to me that maybe something for Abbeyfield house might be a good idea? If not World War I then other periods could be represented. Wendy to who was over yesterday evening for a drink suggested that a box of objects like the briefcase of bits and pieces I was showing her might be interesting for children to look at. From these exchanges and from my dusty hands has emerged the idea of bringing the items to Abbeyfield house and putting together a series of memory boxes. Collections of oddities and items from Patrick’s house which could be used as the basis of activities with children and adults. This would give a fantastic context to this collection of items which emerge in this area over the last hundred years. Suddenly the locality of the things in Patrick’s house would once again have a sense and would not be lost. So now I have to contact Alan and Mary and Norma and get their permission to donate objects to the house.

So the decorative bits and pieces, like the ornamental vases in the photograph, might suddenly find the context once again that keeps them closer to their own very local biography.

18 July 2014

Queens Road neighbourhood centre Halifax

Carl and I drove up to Halifax. I set my phone to satnav and followed the instructions and as we drove up Hopwood Lane we began to see Roma Halifax people walking down the road’s and side streets. Halifax is an impressive town when approached from the right direction. The route we took brought us into the new part of the centre of town to begin with but as we skirted the Victorian town and moved up Hopwood Lane it was clear that the area had been wealthy at some point. There were walls suggesting decorative gardens had lain behind him at one point and the road was wide. Further up more and more terraces began to appear with narrow cobbled lanes between them. The buildings were of an apparent high quality, made of a cut stone rather than the brick we see here in Sheffield. As well as Roma people there were lots are being called South Asians as well. The area didn’t give off a sense of prosperity at this point but my first impression was not one of great poverty. I think it is the apparent quality of the housing which gives that impression. Overall Halifax does not have the impression of a failing city. I say this in the context of the journeys I made into a number of the northern Lancashire mill towns where the dilapidation of the city centres was so evident. Halifax sits in very beautiful steep sided valleys and the hillsides, presumably once entirely to needed of trees, are now richly clad in small forests which make the views from the town quite exceptional in places. The main Victorian town centre sits on an easterly facing slope which must make it cold in winter. In the bottom of the valley runs the railway line and on the hillside above it a dark green coniferous woodland.

We were heading for the Queen’s Road neighbourhood centre. This too is an extremely impressive building. I met the caretaker bust I was there and the building had been erected in the 1860s as a school, not a church school but a school provided by the civic authorities. It differed from the sorts of schools I have seen in Sheffield in that it looked more like some sort of all-night greenhouse. It had very high windows along the whole frontage which stretched a good 60 m. There were two wings to the building which stood proud of the main facade which was entered through a very tall and light main door. Once inside the impression of space and light was not diminished and it was ugly inexplicable to me as I entered what this building must have been like. Very cold is one thing for sure. The caretaker said that originally it had been heated entirely by coal although a boiler system had been put in place around 1900. He said that the building had been put up by the town council on a site which at the time had an income but use across the and onto the hills beyond, facing eastwards towards the rising sun. He said that the front courtyard which must have been almost half an acre had originally been paved entirely with Yorkshire stone. Into this Yorkshire stone had been cast a map of, I think it was Britain, rather than just England, with all of the detail showing the various ports and major cities, natural features carved into the stone as well. He said that the council had taken these paving slabs up and reused them in the town centre turning them upside down. What a waste he said, can you imagine what sorts of heritage was destroyed at this point?

The building is clearly used now by a large variety of community groups and the houses a Council service which is taking the brunt of organisational issues in this area which are resulting from a great increase in the Slovakian Roma population over the past three or four years. We were told to go down a corridor to the left and in the corridor were sitting probably 10 men and women. Two or three of these appeared to be of Pakistani origin, one of them an older man in very traditional costume with a short beard. The majority of the people were Roma. Quite how Roma people are recognised is almost impossible for me to write about. It has to do with people’s clothes and it has to do with the way that their clothes fit their bodies. This feels uncomfortable to write down even in an effectively private sector fieldnotes. But at the same time Pakistani people are recognised, to an extent, by their clothes and the way their clothes fit their bodies. With Roma people the clothes they are wearing show their bodies. Although this is not any sort of rule. Roma people like everybody else vary from very very thin people to very large people. The clothes worn by the Slovakian Roma are distinctive space-space they tend to wear a variety of sportswear, it is not uncommon for men to wear long nylon/silk shorts and very common to wear some sort of sports or running shoes with socks. By and large the men are stocky and very muscular. They are not highly toned but have extremely powerful upper bodies. However they do not exclude any aggression in my experience although I would be naive to imagine that aggression and physical encounter is not a feature of the life for both Roma men and Roma women. The women to our heavily built and often very strong looking. However there are also extremely thin men and women too.

We were meeting with Janice Dawson who works as some sort of council employed community or neighbourhood officer. The area is known as the Park Ward it and extends for a square mile also to the north of the town centre and consists of a number of heavily populated terraced and back-to-back housing areas interspersed with small scale manufacturing or brownfield sites. Driving through I saw there was a mosque and I was told that the area had been populated in the post war years, the 1950s, by Italians and Ukrainians coming to work in the mills. This was followed by the arrival of the South Asian population who became the predominant group in the area. Over the last four years there has been a dramatic transformation and Janice was keen to emphasise how quickly and the astonishment at this taking place. The issues the area faced she said were the same as were probably faced in Rotherham or Sheffield. Issues with the number of school places particularly in the primary system. Demands on health care systems. Concerns about trafficking and prostitution.

She said that they had made a short to DVD at the centre. She had found a Roma Flag or possibly a poster of the flag and put it up at the centre in the hall. She had noticed that people stopped in front of the flag and said pointing at it I am Roma, we are Roma. She realised that it might be helpful to allow people to identify as Roma saying that initially people were frightened, or appeared to be frightened as far as she was concerned, to say they were Roma. The DVD is available on the website.

http://hxcentral.com/ward-forums-other-meetings/projects-in-park/

The centre hosts a variety of council services. The first person to whom I spoke in the office was Shakeela Zaman. At first she appeared to be diffident, and I felt that I was stepping on her toes asking to meet with Janice. However this turned out not to be the case at all and once we had made contact with Janice, who was an extremely if you so friendly and welcoming person, Shakeela also became extremely open and friendly. The office atmosphere was one of humour and gentle ribbing. That there were obviously pressures in the office as well. Janice made a point that during the drop-in which was taking place that day people might turn up from the Roma community with a huge variety of issues some of which were extremely difficult to deal with. She made the point which was corroborated by the other people in the office that it tended to be on a Friday afternoon that the most difficult issues would arrive, the implication was that these were issues connected with trafficking and all prostitution or some form possibly of abuse. In no way it was she trying to suggest that these were slowly problems connected to a Roma population which she clearly saw as a population with a large number of positive attributes. She has been quite clearly very moved by getting to know this group of people and reminding me of the people I have met in Rotherham she was a very clear working-class socialist.

Here is the email I sent to Janice following our meeting:

Hi Janice,
This is what I guess I do as well as be nosy! I keep minutes…
Our discussion today which both Carl and I found really helpful and encouraging – many thanks – consisted of the following points/ideas which you are going to try chase up one way or another! Each one is a photo possibility either at the Queen’s Road centre or elsewhere?

NOTE: we are coming to Community Iftar on 24th so if poss to set up some of the photo opps on the Thursday afternoon from – say – 15.00 onwards (could be there at 13.30 at earliest)

DONE
1. STAN FAKO – done!
2. KAREL – setting up as self employed carpet cleaner – done

TO DO
3. LUCAS – young man with Uni place in London
4. IVAN – Lucas’ brother involved in a Roma Matrix funded initiative and within that doing voluntary work at Credit Union
5. RAHILA – working with a Young Roma Youth Service
6. HALIFAX ROMA GROUP – recently constituted and possibly willing to be photographed
7. COLLAGE – gather together past images of Roma and mixed groups – send digital files to Carl for him to make a selection edit – include such a collage in local exhibition
8. EXHIBITION –in the Queen’s Road building in late/mid November 2014?
9. COMMUNITY IFTAR – Carl and Tim to attend on Thursday 24th

Best
Tim and Carl

Stan Fako was the Slovakian speaking or perhaps speaking worker at the centre. Czech I think he was only partly Roma possibly on one side. With Janice I had a discussion about the issues surrounding the use of non-Roma workers and the attitudes of ethnic Slovakians and Czechs towards the Roma. She understood exactly what I meant and cited an incident in which a worker had been sacked once it was realised that they were belittling and laughing at a class of Roma children acting out I think some sort of Christmas pageant. The Slovakian worker was at that time sniggering and saying what is the point into them doing this they don’t have any sort of religious beliefs or anything they are just ignorant. This person was immediately sacked. Carl photographed Stan when he was talking to firstly one young man who I briefly spoke to afterwards in my very poor and broken Romani. Secondly Carl photographed him speaking to Karel. Karel is setting himself up to be a self-employed carpet cleaner and was filling in some forms while Stan helped search for some cleaning equipment online for him. Karel had some English although it was very limited. Shakeera Immediately said that if he was starting as a carpet cleaner she would give him a go because currently she had to send her carpets of to Huddersfield to get them cleaned.

I went into the corridor while Carl was taking these photographs and tried to introduce myself to 3 Roma people sitting waiting outside. All of them turned out to be from the Czech Republic. The woman had skin which looked as if in some way it was smudged. She didn’t really respond either to write English nought to my attempts at Romani but one of the men dead and engaged with me in a really friendly fashion as if I were a visitor in a foreign country. He had what looked like a very damaged right of eye, glazed and partly white.

This notion of what it is like to learn the language has been very important to me in the past couple of days. I am having great problems learning the language because I have no immediate interlocutors where I am living, by which I mean on my street. Also I noticed that the Roma people I meet, by and large do not appear to have a great interest in my learning to speak their language. I contrast this with the passion with which people in Turkey, including the Roma, were excited that I was trying to speak their language. Is this a normal reaction of a migrant community? That they do not feel comfortable with someone trying to speak their language? Or is it something partly to do with the Czech republic and Slovak people who have some sort of what almost feels like a complex in that approach to speaking English?

I’ve also been thinking about the way that Roma people feel like a people on the move. When a Pakistani person moves or a Greek person moves or an Italian they leave behind their country and come to another country where they live and settle maybe keep or possibly allow their particular identity to gradually be assimilated. The Roma however do not leave the country behind but bring a country with them. They are their country.