Jeff Cloves
There has been a Saturday morning peace picket in Stroud's High Street since the build-up to the Iraq war. This is my pitch for selling PN and seasonal white poppies but I've only just discovered -- to my chagrin -- that the picket predates the arrival of our family in Stroud and has been going on since the war in Kosovo.
The picket is small but, as I've lately been made aware, admirably persistent. It has become part of the street furniture so to speak and this year our…
PHOTO: Fred Chance
I was going to belatedly write about the London demo against cuts but have been waylaid by a novel written by HG Wells in 1913. The World Set Free is one of his prophetic screeds in which – by the 1970s – everything is produced, manufactured, and propelled by nuclear power. In his preface to the 1921 edition, he claimed, with uncharacteristic modesty, “the misses in the story far outnumber the hits”. I found his novel unreadable but his preface had this to say about…
This is a marvellous book about a marvellous man and it’s full of marvels. Remembering Colin Ward comprises transcripts of his friends’ tributes at his funeral – which various PN stalwarts attended – and his memorial meeting in Conway Hall four months later.
In fact, it amounts to a biography in just 50 pages and it makes you wonder at the hundreds of pages spent on lesser beings. To quote from its introductory note: “Colin Ward was an anarchist, a journalist, and an author of books…
A bit of autobiography. Bear with me, there’s reason.
While recuperating from a bicycle accident, I’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Letters to Sartre – in particular those written during the immediate run-up to the German occupation of France in 1940. My mum told me of her dread when, on 3 September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Libyan mothers must be in even more dread now their country has declared war on itself.
My dad, a sheet metal…
The most memorable film I saw in 2010 – at the cinema or on TV – was Julien Temple’s visionary TV documentary Requiem for Detroit.
The most memorable book I read was Richard Mabey’s Weeds. The two are linked. Both produced a surge of hope within me which ran contra to a generalised feeling of despair against which I was battling. Still am. Both works are concerned with – to put it crudely – the survival of the natural world in the teeth of our man-made conspiracy to…
Sheila – a doughty campaigner against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – is currently in hospital in London. She had a bad fall in a departure lounge and misaligned her spine. She is paralysed for the time being; her holiday ended before it began. Her friends in Stroud visit when possible and others write. A letter sent on her behalf in the first week of November, asked us to send her a white poppy.
If Sheila is able to watch TV from her hospital bed she will have observed the…
You think sometimes you’re beyond being shocked any more by anything and then you are. At 8.30pm yesterday (9 September) I listened to the news on BBC Five Live. It’s a sports station so the lead stories concerned sport and corruption I think – I didn’t pay much attention – and then came this bombshell: the Commons had voted overwhelmingly in favour of keeping British troops in Afghanistan. Only 14 MPs voted for their removal. The newsreader stated this was the first time they’d had a chance…
As deaths – and casualties – mount in Afghanistan and crowds turn out to greet the returning coffins and TV stations show bereaved families united in grief, I imagine the conflicting emotions I feel are shared by most PN readers.
We know exactly how many British servicemen and women have been killed in the prosecution of this war, yet we have no idea how many enemy combatants have been killed. In fact, we have no idea who they were or if they were actually combatants.
…
This column purports to be a review of PVT West’s poetry but it requires confession. Pat was a friend and poet/performer with whom I worked from time to time for over 30 years. Take this into account.
When Pat died I wrote of her here. Two years on, a new book of her poems has, to my chagrin, made me realise I hadn’t appreciated how significant she was – and is. I knew she felt under-valued and I realise that I under-valued her too.
In her beautiful poem, “Lament”,…
The greatest pleasure in writing for PN has always been that its editors let me write about whatever catches my fancy. And my fancy is to write about anything I fancy will interest PN readers.
However, my piece on cowardice and bravery is currently on PN’s website and exemplifies how the net has changed my notion of “PN readers”. I used to regard them as comrades-in-(harmless)-arms; now they could just be serendipitous surfers.
It’s too late to change my writing…
I read, with uneasy and strongly personal interest, the discussions in September’s issue. For the whole of my conscious life – or so it seems – I have been confronted by this question: “What would you, a pacifist, have done in the Second World War?” For years, my feeble cop-out was to say: I wasn’t even two when it started so I’m concerned with now, not then.
However, the question is a valid and proper one and, if it is posed by someone whose father fought and died in the Second…
There was a letter in October’s PN headlined: “Research on Reading”. I missed the capital letter and found I was reading about Reading and the impact of the cold war on this town. In the way of things, everything seemed to connect with one of September’s Peace Week events in Stroud.
Bruce Kent and Kate Hudson were to speak at a public meeting, and Dennis Gould and myself had been rowed in as “peace poets”. An odd thing to be; a “peace poet”.
I’m no more a peace poet…
During the Second World War, BSA Cycles made folding bicycles for paratroopers. Thus, the machines descended into occupied Europe attached to the backs of terrified soldiers suspended beneath graceful silk canopies.
It’s hard to imagine a more surreal conjunction of mechanical ingenuity, inspired sewing and blind trust in morality. Mortality, though, would be a better word and ironies abound. BSA stood for Birmingham Small Arms, which manufactured Lee-Enfield rifles for the “poor…
Not many people know this: the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) is 75 this year. I only know because a woman stopped me in Stroud High Street and told me. Her name turned out to be the same as a poet whose work I know and he turned out to be her father: Ian Serraillier (1912-1994).
Then it turned out he’d written an acclaimed novel for children, The Silver Sword, which has never been out of print in over 50 years. He was a Quaker, a conscientious objector in the Second World War…
When the Ministry of Defence decided that the only way of defending the UK from annexation by the Communist Hordes was to threaten to blast them to Kingdom Come with an atomic bomb it knew just what to do. It practised a bit of annexation itself and reactivated the RAF base at Greenham Common (enclosed for military purposes during World War II) and handed it over to US Strategic Air Command. Here in Stroud, our wonderful Rodborough Common has not been so annexed and rightly remains a Stroud…
