All posts by Bruce Johns

Leave to Remain

Reviews

Opponents of immigration love statistics and the words they unleash on our subconscious: swamp, tidal wave, illegal, fear. Personal stories they are less keen on with their power to move and instil sympathy. By dramatising the plight of young asylum seekers Leave to Remain reminds us of the suffering behind the numbers and calls for an answer to the problem that reconciles border controls with compassion and decency.

Bruce Goodison’s film , a low budget labour of love shot entirely on location uses a cast consisting mainly of refugees whose energy and raw talent gives the action much of its charm and authenticity. Noof Ousellam, the only one of the leads with acting experience plays Omar, an Afghan with a dark secret concealed by his bravado. Yasmin Mwanza is compelling as Zizidi, a girl more abused in her home country than seems bearable whose discovery of friendship and excitement at seeing snow offer glimpses of innocence retrieved from the worst kind of experience. But in many respects the still heart of the story is Abdul, a child adrift in a strange world: traumatised, introverted, uncomprehending. Masieh Zarrien’s face, immobile yet wonderfully expressive is the image one carries away, the bewildered face of a political controversy.

And then there is Toby Jones playing Nigel, the case worker, teacher and confidant of the teenage runaways. He is on something of a roll at the moment having starred in Marvellous and The Detectorists, and as he revealed in a Q & A session after the film was screened at the Borderlines film festival his Captain Mainwaring will be with us next year. Convincing yet understated performances in all of these roles display a mastery of screen acting and an insight into the interior lives of eccentrics and misfits that make him an oddball Everyman, an alternative national treasure.

There are dangers in this kind of enterprise, not least the temptation to preach and to take sides between victims and villains, depicting white hats and black hats rather than rounded characters. Leave to Remain largely avoids these traps. The functionaries of Lunar House are hard-pressed and obliged to be suspicious, flesh and blood in a system designed not to feel. Nigel is gullible, neglects his own family and lies on oath if only to protect his vulnerable charges. He is also a lousy teacher of English, but that is my own experience talking. As for the kids, Omar is guarded, hard to read and not always likeable while the others betray all the most irritating traits of adolescence. But far from hardening one’s heart this allows them the ultimate right – which the system they struggle with rarely confers – of being difficult and flawed. In short, of being human.

With a Song in My Art

Reviews

The RSC production of Love’s Labours Lost has received lavish, if not quite ecstatic praise – four stars rather than five in our brave new Trip Advisor world of criticism. We saw it the other night via the live broadcast from Stratford and judging from the conversation around us emerged almost alone in our reservations.

The play itself has plenty of flaws. Four men falling in love with four women at the same moment is a contrivance made necessary by limited time, but a contrivance nonetheless. Their being deceived by the donning of masks might be a comment on the limits of male constancy but still stretches belief to breaking point. And so on. These plots should never be taken too seriously – the language is what most of us come for; but the joins show, the mechanisms creak on the modern stage.

That brings me to the figure of Don Armado, although I blame the production more than the playwright for his portrayal. To an Elizabethan audience the Spanish were enemies, Love’s Labours being written only a few years after the Armada. Ridicule is a handy weapon against oppressors – witness the lampooning of Hitler. We have fewer excuses, however and poking fun at someone’s funny accent (whose own language most of us could not be bothered to learn) is the limpest, laziest trope of English humour, superiority and inferiority complexes rolled into one. ‘Piss’ for ‘Peace’, ‘Arse’ for ‘Arts’: is that really the best we can do?

Something similar can be said with regard to class, there being occurrences in many Shakespeare plays of toffs laughing at or patronising the hoi polloi. I often find this uncomfortable but try not to apply my prejudices retrospectively. These days, and particularly in the current climate a well-spoken, hereditary élite poking fun at the lower classes is much harder to take. The decision to place the action in Charlecote, a citadel of more recent wealth and privilege increases my discomfort. The aim is to show that era on the verge of collapse, and a contrast in fortunes may well be evident in this production’s companion piece Love’s Labours Won which I have yet to see. But as inequalities widen to Edwardian levels and tax-dodging plutocrats loot our public services it is hard not to take offence.

In short, a self-congratulatory spirit informs this production. It is Shakespeare for les satisfaits: the old, well-heeled or (judging by the younger faces picked out by the cameras) privately-educated. But now there is a wider audience to be catered for. Live screenings by the RSC, the National Theatre and other companies have opened up access like never before – a boon for people like us who live in the sticks and a fabulous revenue stream. But enlarging the catchment area means responding to more mainstream tastes, and there were two signs of this yesterday. The introductory interviews with members of the cast brought well-intentioned but patronising messages about not understanding all of the speeches and letting the whole thing ‘wash over’ us, the modern-day Costards and Dulls. More significantly there seemed to be a distinct drift towards musical theatre which has done well for the RSC in recent years and has virtually replaced serious drama in many places. Several characters, Moth most noticeably burst into song at regular intervals and although these may be in the text is there any need to turn them into big production numbers? If this is dumbing down it brings echoes of Tom Stoppard’s play The Hard Question – also coming soon to a cinema near you. He has already made changes to accommodate customer bemusement at the subject matter and complained at the declining intellectual range of playgoers. What price a further concession along the RSC’s lines? Stand by for Consciousness: the Musical.

Thursday 4 December

December

I turn into the Spinney at the moment a clock announces the time. It must be our local church about a mile away to the south west, although others are audible with the wind in the right direction. Parishes are units of sound as well as government, their borders regulated by the atmosphere. Their character, too, the chimes I have just heard plodding and sombre in tune with the cloud. The lane comes under a number of jurisdictions: sensory as well as procedural, imagined no less than real. I think of labourers in the fields on either side counting down the hours. Wakeful nights made sonorous and companionable. Local conscripts in the trenches dreaming of bells. Whole lives were spent within earshot of their summons, an experience we think of as limiting – although my taste of it this past year has not been so bad. As others have pointed out, there is something to be said for knowing a small world well.

My walk proceeds, one of those days when noticing requires little effort or elaboration. The empty can which landed in the hedge has found its way to the ground, perhaps blown there, although it has not been windy; dislodged by a scavenger; or having its support taken away by the shedding of leaves. The splinter of old road sign, recumbent in the verge, has its concave side facing upwards and is filling with debris from the oak overhead. I notice, however, that nothing is falling from the trees today, a moratorium hard to explain given the descent previously noted in all types of weather. The grass in the Paddy looks very green but the central part of the field is occupied by a floppy-eared plant which covers the earth with the diligence of a crop, not the ragedness of a weed. Birds fidget in front of the white cottage: tree sparrows, blue tits and a couple of chaffinches, dropping to the ground. These observations are loyal to what I intended in the lane, events recorded without regard to their significance. A buzzard crosses in front of me, its wings shrugging to maintain altitude, and I see myself through its eye: upright, earthbound, indigenous.

5 November

November

It seems fitting to describe an evening walk today, when the promise of bonfires and fireworks is made by a clear sky with an all-seeing moon. One night short of being full, it resembles a circle drawn freehand, the circumference slightly dented. The technical term is waxing gibbous, which sounds like a rock band or Restoration wood carver, and its albedo, meaning the ratio of reflected to non-reflected light, seems particularly strong. Yet this borrowed brilliance is gentle on the eye, the outline clean, the glare commuted to something watchable.

I start at the fire in Mistletoe Orchard. The whizz-bangs have finished and not everyone stays but there are enough half-lit figures to assert the lineage of such gatherings. Early humans frightened of the night. Witches and heretics burning. Childhood with its offer, still to be weighed, of excitement and danger. I am the last to leave, and the only one to head outwards rather than going home. The Spinney has never seemed darker, the plantation to my left never more of a vision. It suggests another attempt at drawing, the poplars not quite straight, not exactly parallel. Or a huge brush with treetops for bristles. Or, with its stillness and mantra-like repetition of shapes, it is the place where I glimpsed enlightenment, images summoned but quickly exhausting themselves to leave the sanctum unoccupied, a stillness perfect for meditation.

Out in the open the full glory of the night is disclosed: black shadows, rockets glittering miles away. And with it the nature of moonlight’s paradox, everything clear yet unrevealed. The hunched profile of hedgerows. The trees on Flanders Hill dreamily insubstantial. The coastline of an oak canopy, indented with little fjords, but not its landmass, its wooden heart. Torchlight dances ahead of me and picks up something on the road: a dead blackbird, hit by a car, the tarmac dainty with jewels of dark blood. It looks pagan, a sacrifice, a warning to go no further. But with its wings fanned and head thrown back it could also be dancing – a mating ritual, a victory strut or some other exotic ecstasy. Such is the spell cast by this negative light. Everything familiar and disconcertingly strange.

26 October

October

The clocks have gone back and although my starting time is no different the morning feels more advanced. My wife, who tags along, says she and Dougie are bored with the lane and takes him into the Cloves for a run. I make a joke about desertion but she has a point. Now the heyday of summer is past there is little new to see and only so much one can say about the colour of leaves. But I have been surprised too often to doubt something will turn up, and if for once nothing does – well, I can write about that.

Liberated from the tugging lead I follow my own instincts, stopping to listen when a wren strikes up, the shrillness nagging like tinnitus. Then movement distracts me among the ivy flowers. I was wrong about the bees, there are still a few scraping the barrel for pollen, and more than one wasp which, overcoming my revulsion, I look at more closely. I want to believe they have hatched from the parasitic growths seen during summer but they look too large and will not keep still long enough to identify. I have hated them since being stung on the tongue while drinking lemonade. The barb hardly penetrated, but like Captain Hook with his crocodile I suspect them all of wanting to finish the job. Yet an interest in wasps is implied by my fascination with galls. The challenges of natural history are not confined to one’s powers of observation.

A gap in the hedge interrupts this reverie and through it I see that Tall Tree Orchard, having been first with the harvest, is now leading the rush towards winter. It has turned a uniform, blighted shade of yellow and has started to shed leaves, which settle on the earth beneath each row, recently clogged with apples. Drawing level with a similar window onto the Cloves I look right like a soldier on parade and see no loss of green, but a figure passes through a break in the trees, her hair the copper of late beech. It is a sign – and a sight few mortals get to see: my wife, the goddess of autumn.

9 September

September

Last night we came close to a frost, the moon huge, the sky clean, the air tingling with cold. Approaching the lane I see the sheep huddled for warmth around one of the trees in Mistletoe Orchard. It looks like a meeting, to plan the day’s rumination perhaps. Dew sparkles in the early light. A buzzard lands on a telegraph pole then lifts off again, the interval so short it resembles a bounce. And here too the apples have begun to drop. I heard the same thing in the Cloves recently, the impact softened by grass but still resounding, the thud momentous somehow if not exactly Newtonian.

The bales have gone from the Paddy and from its counterpart across the B-road on Flanders Hill. I miss them, without quite knowing why. Perhaps it is that for a short time they make something strange of the world, objects explicable in origin but alien in form with their massive, incongruous geometry. I am not sure de Chirico ever painted a rural scene but that is what they call to mind, a landscape made dream-like and anomalous.
It is also noticeable that the grass is already pushing through the stubble, a green shadow on its fair complexion. Last year beet was grown, causing me to misread the flamboyant leaves of dock in the verges. Will the field revert to pasture in this phase of the rotation or be ploughed for another crop to be sown? Either way there is a sense of things coming full circle which, apart from its seasonal connotations, makes me aware of my own year turning. Two thirds of the way into this diary or vigil – I am still not sure what to call it – the lane is beginning to repeat itself. Take the ivy whose berries I noted in January and which took weeks to disperse. The flower heads, posies of yellow florets with green bracts, have given birth to the next wave of fruit, each embryo with a nose cone like the spike on a helmet. Nature repels me sometimes with its indifference to suffering, its ruthless numbers game; but this resurgence of life, whatever form it takes, is poignant and irrepressible.

29 August

August

The process continues of re-immersing myself in the lane, even yesterday’s wider eyes exposed as partially-sighted. I missed, for example, the first snowberries inside the entrance to the Spinney, white globes hiding coyly among the leaves whose glimmer I mistake at first for light glancing off dew. The same goes for elder’s autumn livery, a still more glaring omission. The berries are ripening fast, as black and glossy as caviar, while its foliage passes through the most bashful of yellows to the faded pink of an old juice stain. A clump of white clover is also on the turn, the bushy heads showing lilac tendencies, while enchanter’s nightshade has not done with summer yet, a more forgivable oversight on my part, the flowers tiny and self-effacing.

It is coming back to me now, the profit I had from studying plants closely. A smooth pea gall on the blade of a rose leaf resembles a piercing on someone’s tongue. And elsewhere I spot a shield bug, common enough it is true but more present to my gaze for some reason: the triangular plate extending backwards from the head, the dark wedge at the end of its carapace, similar in appearance to leaf mould, and a series of notches round the perimeter like marquetry. The first of these is, I read later, the scutellum; the last may reveal the edges of posterior wings. This information draws me in, my desire to be an expert gratified, but obscures the encounter itself and the responses it drew from me. I blow gently, hoping to see the insect move, its fastidious, high-stepping gait fondly remembered; but apart from stirring slightly the bug remains still. Only when I nudge the leaf does it react and I see that the left rear leg is missing while its counterpart on the other side drags lamely. This is a creature with no consciousness of its predicament, that will not experience the imminent snuffing of its life in any way we would recognise. Yet watching it limp towards the base of the leaf I am moved to pity and wonder if that feeling is less worthy of merit than being able to name its parts.

16 July

July

The sun is on station as I begin my walk but coming back I look up to find the sky quilted by cloud, with no leading edge to reveal its direction. My mind is elsewhere, anticipating a return to yesterday’s unfinished business; but it would take an extreme level of distraction to miss the white trumpets of convolvulus in the hedge by Tall Tree Orchard. I once wrote a poem about this plant, but really about my father who saw through the Latin to the pest he insisted on calling bindweed. As a result it was one of the few wild flowers I could identify before writing about the lane. In the opposite verge I notice how the seed pods on garlic mustard have turned woody and purple, protruding like antlers from some country house wall. Then, on the other side again, a buzzard rises from the top of the hedge as hobbled by gravity as a cargo plane.

But for once the walk is little more than a displacement activity. Back home, with Hubbard as a guide, I knuckle down to my specimens of grass. The stalks, or culms, are hollow and separated into chambers by irregularly-spaced nodes which can be detected by caressing the stem. This is where leaves arise, cylindrical at first before flattening into blades. The culms terminate in flowers, the branched type of which, dominating my sample, is known as a panicle. Each individual head is a spikelet, the stalk on which it grows being known as a pedicel.

This is arcane knowledge by any standards – and I have left out some of the more recondite detail which can only be detected with the aid of magnification. Is it possible to name the species I have collected without knowing, for example, whether something has a glume and an awn; or am I guilty of cowardice under fire, unable to summon the mental effort this discipline requires? In search of a quick, morale-boosting win I look for the long, tail-like flower-head which is the most striking of my collection and come up with Timothy grass, an American import used widely for hay. I rest for now on these limited, tickly laurels.

4 June

June, The Lane

I think of spring as the most exciting time of year on account of the colour in the verges. Reinforcements are still arriving, witness the giant sow thistle, a truly villainous plant, from whose plump finials yellow brush-heads are squeezing like difficult births. Or the small, three-leafed newcomer with tiny yellow blooms which might be black medick. But as earlier risers fade away I am reminded that flowers are only a means to an end, namely the production of seeds with which the parents can repeat themselves and multiply. Who can fail to be in awe of such resourcefulness and ingenuity? But these qualities applied to nothing other than replication provoke sober thoughts on the nature of existence, even ours with its capacity for registering the paradox. The cosmic accident of life, the greening of a planet, the evolution of language with which to frame these reflections: that all this started, and mostly continues, with the simple, unexamined drive to make copies of genetic code strikes me as both wonderful and deficient in meaning.

To cheer myself up I think instead about the products of all this exhausting effort, which reveal themselves to be no less fascinating or, in their own way, beautiful as flowers. By virtue of its prominence numerically cow parsley is a good place to start. The white umbelifers have mostly given way to small, banana-like clusters of cylindrical pods which viewed en masse have a cross-hatching effect on the eye. No less profuse but camouflaged by the hedges, goosefoot has produced tiny balls covered in stiff hairs on stalks pointing in different directions, each assemblage calling to mind planets or the structure of an atom. Herb Robert’s seeds are contained in green hips from which extend single antennae narrowing towards the end and tipped with a slight thickness or serif. Yet another solution is come up with by Herb Bennet whose red-brown globes bristle with a thick coat of whiskers hard to associate with the yellow flowers that begat them. The satisfaction derived from examining these botanical gadgets lays to rest my earlier melancholy and raises a question. Could the pleasure or benefit inspired by something be its reason to exist?