Met the proposal deadline. Now the task is to do the big project. Need to decide play or prose piece.
Tough choices to make before September.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Return to Cardiff 1 March 2008
St David's Day......... time to plan the trip to Cardiff next week....... mixed feelings..... going back infrequently.....feelings always mixed during my time there..... still stuck a bit with two issues ....my mother's death and the weird experience of sudden bereavement, guilt and a lot of unsaid things...... and the time I lived there as a closet case and a fairly guilty gay scene.... fumbled encounters in dark corners or morris minis when the gear stick came into its own as as a sex toy......a few ghosts still linger but it feels like they are friendly ones......... I have a different reason to go ...... to visit the Butetown History Centre... looking forward to meeting Michael Flynn who looks after it ...... his voice is warm and welcoming on the phone.... like rich honey flowing from an upended spoon..........I have a good feeling about the research.......... can't wait to see those photos and hear the voices telling me about their lives........
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Real voices February 12 2008
The Western Mail has published my letter asking for people to contact me about my project, especially people from the black community in Butetown who grew up during the War.
I get a phone call on Saturday from Edna Sadler, aged 75, who was a black African child growing up in Cardiff down the Docks.
She has written her lifestory as part of a recent MA at Manchester University. She tells me tales of her days at grammar school - the only black person there and her mother telling her not to say the family is from Africa.
'Tell them you are Portuguese and that you live in Grangetown'( a white working class area adjoining the Docks).
She agrees to talk to me further and is writing to me.
I get a phone call on Saturday from Edna Sadler, aged 75, who was a black African child growing up in Cardiff down the Docks.
She has written her lifestory as part of a recent MA at Manchester University. She tells me tales of her days at grammar school - the only black person there and her mother telling her not to say the family is from Africa.
'Tell them you are Portuguese and that you live in Grangetown'( a white working class area adjoining the Docks).
She agrees to talk to me further and is writing to me.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Starting research February 8 2008
It's time to get down to the real research and plan the time it is going to take.
Got to find the right materials and want to meet some of the people who go all the way back to the late 1930s and 1940s.
I have found organisations in Cardiff which link directly to the history of the local black community.
Understanding the global context will inform my writing.Cardiff was the coal capital before the first world war and by the outbreak of the second world war exports had halved.
It was a hub for sending equipment to American forces in Europe in 1944 and was also a target for the German bombs.
Got to find the right materials and want to meet some of the people who go all the way back to the late 1930s and 1940s.
I have found organisations in Cardiff which link directly to the history of the local black community.
Understanding the global context will inform my writing.Cardiff was the coal capital before the first world war and by the outbreak of the second world war exports had halved.
It was a hub for sending equipment to American forces in Europe in 1944 and was also a target for the German bombs.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Memory 31 January 2008
' Memories can be polished, like objects taken out, burnished, and contemplated, or they can flitter just out of reach, like lost threads of broken webs.' AS Byatt: Memory: An Anthology '
The collection of extracts, poems and essays demonstrates the complexity of recall and the capacity of the brain to pull down those things which we haven't retrieved for many years.
A smell like creosote on a newly painted wooden fence always conjures up a summer's day for me when I was eight or nine and I can still see my street, baking in midsummer heat, flying ants everywhere, the sound of the raised voices of other children playing, the endless times of school holidays, when everyday feels like a month and every week a life time.
What is it about time when you are a child? It's possible to recall immensely detailed moments, the smells, the colours, the mood of a particular moment even though it is rarely visited.
The collection of extracts, poems and essays demonstrates the complexity of recall and the capacity of the brain to pull down those things which we haven't retrieved for many years.
A smell like creosote on a newly painted wooden fence always conjures up a summer's day for me when I was eight or nine and I can still see my street, baking in midsummer heat, flying ants everywhere, the sound of the raised voices of other children playing, the endless times of school holidays, when everyday feels like a month and every week a life time.
What is it about time when you are a child? It's possible to recall immensely detailed moments, the smells, the colours, the mood of a particular moment even though it is rarely visited.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Misremembering 29 January 2008
One of the aspects of memory I am going to explore comes out of an anthology on Memory which suggests that people recall the past in a flawed way.
In some cases they are convinced in their own minds that this is an authentic process but they changed their story in the very act of its retelling. In other cases it takes the form of a lie.
William Maxwell:
'In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.' (Memory: An Anthology: ed. AS Byatt, 2008)
My project will include this dimension as part of my character development to show how the past is always with us but also allows us a degree of self delusion and in certain circumstances allows us to mislead or lie to others with the consequences that it brings.
In some cases they are convinced in their own minds that this is an authentic process but they changed their story in the very act of its retelling. In other cases it takes the form of a lie.
William Maxwell:
'In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.' (Memory: An Anthology: ed. AS Byatt, 2008)
My project will include this dimension as part of my character development to show how the past is always with us but also allows us a degree of self delusion and in certain circumstances allows us to mislead or lie to others with the consequences that it brings.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Picture This 27 January 2008
I am going to use photographs from the 40s and 50s to help get the period detail right when I embark on my project.
Bert Hardy was working in these decades and captures some vivid images of the black community in Tiger Bay/Butetown.
He had a rapport with these people - a white, working class, cockney born into poverty around the Elephant and Castle. He had no political agenda but shows how life was lived in a place cut off from the rest of the city of Cardiff. A.L.Lloyd, a contemporary and friend of Bert says a lot about Tiger Bay and its difference:
" -----the area is a slender finger jutting into the sea, bounded on one side by the railway tracks and on the other by the canal, and choked at the top end, the town end, by a stout, black viaduct that seals off the district as surely as if it was a tall iron gate guarded by a white man in blue."
Bert Hardy has done a service to history but photography they say cannot be taken at face value as hard evidence. I am not sure what my perspective is on that but I relate to this quote from Henri Carter Bresson, taken from his book 'The Decisive Moment' (1952):
" We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
"We cannot develop and print a memory."
My job will be to try to recreate something - albeit as a work of fiction drawing, in part, on my mother's memories of Cardiff in the Second World War. In doing so I will have to recollect my memories of her stories but I will also seek out the stories of others who came or come from a different part of the city, a place cut off from the rest of the city but not from history and the events which shaped the lives of everyone living there.
Bert Hardy was working in these decades and captures some vivid images of the black community in Tiger Bay/Butetown.
He had a rapport with these people - a white, working class, cockney born into poverty around the Elephant and Castle. He had no political agenda but shows how life was lived in a place cut off from the rest of the city of Cardiff. A.L.Lloyd, a contemporary and friend of Bert says a lot about Tiger Bay and its difference:
" -----the area is a slender finger jutting into the sea, bounded on one side by the railway tracks and on the other by the canal, and choked at the top end, the town end, by a stout, black viaduct that seals off the district as surely as if it was a tall iron gate guarded by a white man in blue."
Bert Hardy has done a service to history but photography they say cannot be taken at face value as hard evidence. I am not sure what my perspective is on that but I relate to this quote from Henri Carter Bresson, taken from his book 'The Decisive Moment' (1952):
" We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
"We cannot develop and print a memory."
My job will be to try to recreate something - albeit as a work of fiction drawing, in part, on my mother's memories of Cardiff in the Second World War. In doing so I will have to recollect my memories of her stories but I will also seek out the stories of others who came or come from a different part of the city, a place cut off from the rest of the city but not from history and the events which shaped the lives of everyone living there.
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