The Man who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy

 A fascinating book written in a compelling style - lots of conversations. Takes us from London to Berlin in GDR times, and back again.

There are many allusions which had me listening to Abbey Road again. It's mainly Octopus's Garden it makes me think of - the early chapters where Saul (Saw-all) visits Jennifer More eau in her damp flat with the seaweed in a bucket, and they eat oysters, and the naked girl students come glistening from the sauna. There's a lot I don't understand. What is the meaning of the way the girls jump over the gate? I feel it all means something.

Saul wears pearls around his neck, which partly signposts his bisexuality but also is reminiscent of a quotation from the Tempest (and the Waste Land) "Those are pearls that were his eyes" - Saul will need a good many of these eyes if he is to see everything.

This is a report by a local man who has just recovered from COVID-19

https://nextdoor.co.uk/post/17592193820812?init_source=copy_link_share


Feeling much better now. Spent nearly 4 days in St Peter’s Hospital, Chertsey, after 10 days of self-isolation at home, with constant fever, nausea, which resulted in me not being able to eat a thing for around 5 days, sore throat, cough and breathlessness. Even a glass of water made me retch. My perception of taste and smell became strangely distorted. I’ve lost 1 stone 4 pounds in weight. I saw terrible suffering. A youngish guy in the bed next to me, when I was in an open ward, was in great discomfort and was struggling to breathe with a high fever. I was lucky compared to those whose immune systems get out of control and also develop pneumonia. I was put on a drip for fluids, an anti-emetic for the nausea and two powerful antibiotics for a secondary lung infection that untreated could easily have progressed to pneumonia. I was put on oxygen as my levels were low due to shortness of breath. I was checked with an ECG machine in an ambulance and on the ward, had a chest x-ray and manually checked for breathing etc by three doctors, as well as several rounds of blood tests to look for markers and organ function. It is a strange illness. There is some overlap with flu, but a lot of the time due to the nausea that was constant, it felt like my body was trying to reject a poison. The majority of the hospital seemed to be dealing with the virus. Blue polythene air locks had been put up at the entrances to all wards with hazard tape. I knew that I was in the eye of the storm, and it felt surreal, like a scene from a post-apocalyptic, biological warfare film. My mind with fever was struggling to process the enormity of the situation as I got moved between various wards on a bed. Most of all, I really feel for the nurses, support staff and doctors who have to knowingly enter into a life-threatening, toxic environment every day and work so incredibly hard. Tragically, some have paid the ultimate price, and left loved ones and dependents behind. I heard staff outside the side room, that I was fortunate to be put into after being on a large ward until I tested positive for COVID-19, talking anxiously about the lack of personal protective equipment. I cannot bear the hypocritical bleatings coming out of the Tory party after their years of ideologically driven austerity that has hurt the poor, the disabled and the disadvantaged most, whilst protecting the super-wealthy from contributing far more in taxes. As for the queen and royal family who were revealed to be taking advantage of overseas tax loopholes by keeping parts of their vast wealth in off-shore tax havens when the media broke the Panama Paper’s scandal. What collective short term memories we have for their breathtaking hypocrisy. And she has the audacity to deliver a speech from her gilded palace. Then there’s the ‘bullshit of Bono’ as he and the celebrity class were also revealed to be taking advantage of overseas tax-havens. The Tories have been stealthily privatising huge chunks of the NHS, selling it off to Tory business types such as Branson’s Virgin Health, BUPA etc, whilst paying nurses and hospital staff a pittance for their professionalism and commitment. They are supported by the tax dodging, benighted, Murdoch, Barclay brothers media empire that includes The Mail, Times, Telegraph, Express, Sun, Star and Sky. How misinformed and brainwashed we are by them as they maintain the status quo, the Tory power structure, and the royal hierarchy. It’s all based on personal greed and self-interest. The Conservatives have left the NHS woefully short of nurses, hospital beds and equipment. I hope this is a game-changer, and that people do not have the ignorance to lap up the right-wing media and vote for the Tories ever again. It is time to redistribute the vast wealth that the UK sits on and close down the overseas tax loopholes that serve the wealthy and royals for good. I feel so very fortunate not to have fully succumbed to this virus and grateful for the intervention of my sister Anne who pushed me to call 999 when I thought I’d be able to continue fighting it at home. I am so very grateful to the ambulance crew who checked me out and whizzed me up to hospital in the early hours, and the kindness and care of all the nurses, support staff and doctors at St Peter’s who are working in deplorable conditions. Happy to be recuperating at home with my son James. Big thanks and hugs to the dedicated staff at St Peter’s, family and friends ❤️ !

The responses he received from our neighbours were furious - people telling him not to post political opinions and berate the royal family. Funny, hopeless and sad. The people around here are dyed in the wool Boris-lovers who read the Daily Mail and believe every word. Education was wasted on them.

We have not been through this before

Awake at 4 in the morning, and there being no prospect of sleeping, I realised that there is a reason for disturbed sleep, in that our lives are disturbed and we are all probably anxious, even the children, because we haven't been this way before, and this is very serious.

I worry about the economy at the best of times, and now I can see only too clearly that business cannot easily recover from this awful stagnation, and that firms are going to have to downsize. My brother was on the phone and told me that when firms need to economize they fire managers - expensive people who add nothing to the bottom line. They don't tend to sack the people who bring in the revenue - those providing the service or making the product unless demand falls. But when the economy really shrinks there is less money and demand falls. And that's where we're headed. So I am having a big worry about that.

More acutely because closer at hand, I am worried about the compound to the allotment shop, because there is not much security and if you are quite nimble you can climb over the gate and help yourself to the items in the compound. These are large items - manure, compost, strulch. You would have to be quite strong to haul them over the gate but it wouldn't be impossible. Anyway, I think that's what's happening. I think about 15 bags of compost have gone missing. I imagine the culprit is one or two of the newer plot-holders, and they raid at night. We do have CCTV but we don't do anything with it. It's a deterrent only. We have always said that when we have a problem we shall review getting a monitor and making it work. Maybe it doesn't work at all?

I calculate a profit margin of about 30% on the goods we sell because there's a lot of wastage on time-limited items and some goods have to make up for those losses.  The price for this kind of compost has gone up, and at present there is practically no profit on it at all! 15 bags is a lot of profit to throw away.

Another worry is Mr M Law, who has written to the Trustees of the Charity protesting about the terms of the Lease, and you feel that he wouldn't do this unless he hated the allotments and everyone there. Although the Trustees have been very reasonable and accommodating to us, someone like ML can really turn things around, as he did before in a way that benefited the allotment association, now he is trying it the other way around. I can only assume he is the sort of person who likes poking sticks in ants' nests.

All this and COVID-19 too. The Prime Minister has got it now. There is no reason to suppose he will have it badly. But perhaps the news made me think of him and his pregnant girlfriend in Number Ten, and that's unprecedented too. He doesn't behave like a respectable man. I didn't trust him on the economy (because leaving the EU doesn't make economic sense) and now the economy will probably tank anyway, as the world economy will be so damaged. The kind of things that will damage us include that there won't be jobs for our young people, and unlike the Poles and Hungarians I used to teach, our young people tend not to be the kind that just go abroad, learn the language and make a new life. They tend to be weak and lazy and terribly dependent on their Mums and Dads.

Oh dear, I am feeling low. Maybe this is all because of ML being such a sod, and those 15 bags of compost!

COVID Journal from Saturday 22nd March

The previous week was quite interesting because Simon brought his new girlfriend home on the night that Frances brought her boyfriend Ashok to stay!! I was quite worried about food for all these people because I have been counting the calories and now have a bad relationship with food and cooking. So they had to have pizzas. Ashok and F stayed on the sofa-bed because we have a small house. Stan's girlfriend turns out to be a nurse in a private hospital. Frances, revising, kept checking her phone for news as she said her exams might not go ahead. The next day they were postponed until some time in the future. The 5th years could not take their exams either but were being drafted to help in the stricken hospitals where more experienced staff were self-isolating or had fallen ill. Flo wondered when her 4th-year cohort would be called in to help.

(My friend Susan emailed out of the blue about the desperate situation for doctors and nurses, turns out she fears she won't survive. Nobody over 55 to be given an ITU bed. She is also very fearful for her daughter, a cancer nurse, although Bim does her job dressed in a condom suit every day, so she's very lucky! )

Ashok's exams were also postponed so he could not say when he would graduate. They worked for a day or so and then gave up and started getting restless. Simon was working from home so they were a little group of three watching movies and doing exercises together - I took them out to The Anglers for lunch one day, Hampton Court (still open) the next and then they took themselves out. S can't really stand working from home and is going crazy. Girlfriend (Megan) came back at the weekend - we all find her very easy to like. Now her private hospital is to be co-opted by the gvt and is to cope with Covid as well. She is pleased! She told us of more COVID fatalities (3 in Royal Hosp Guildford) and in Frimley.

Ashley left his school, and hurriedly – hardly any time for goodbyes, everyone unprepared. He has to prepare 2 weeks of online teaching for the girls, then that’s it. 3 boxes of files on the floor. Job at another school fell through due to the fact that the girls are all at home.

Allotment - I cut the kale down and froze it all, made potato and kale soup, manured the ground. I dug over another bed preparing for potatoes and other roots. I finished the AGM minutes and sent them to the committee. I planted a few trays of seeds. We have had the first few stalks of rhubarb. Ordered strawberry and raspberry plants that haven't been delivered yet. The allotment shop went into overdrive at the weekend - we took £600 in 4 hours, and that on small purchases. Had rules in place - one customer in the shop at a time - but a lot of people tried to ignore it. We are all very slow at getting the message. I was thrilled by the take, but I know we can't keep the shop open any longer. We sold out of stable manure and I ordered some more the next day and was surprised that they were still delivering orders as this is not essential business. 

Frances went with Ashok to Southampton on Tuesday, Ashok packed his stuff then they both went to Brum, she and her stuff came home yesterday with her dad. More boxes of stuff on the floor. Then she got the message to start work soon in a Birmingham hospital in some capacity, which she wants to do. She won’t be put anywhere near COVID patients (but some of them have it but don’t know it). She has made us all a colour-coded timetable consisting of yoga, work, lunch, rest, exercise, work, artistic time, and dinner.

That Sunday we went for a walk that A swore would be 1 hour long and it lasted 3 hours. We went by the sewage works to Brooklands and then along by the river to Byfleet, where we met with a gated estate, very like our own, which we had to walk around, and it was a long way round and some time before we found a path to the Wey Navigation (the canal) and walked back by the delightful M25, roaring traffic, to the next lock, and then across the fields to Weybridge. Phew. So tiring. We passed between ten and 20 people on our walk and had to get quite near each other to pass on the narrow track. We also passed a co-op that had a good offer on for beer and pizzas, so we bought the offer and also ingredients for a mushroom risotto, which F cooked, and it was very nice. The girl in the shop was totally exposed to customers standing on the other side of the counter. There were no eggs. There were boys working together to unpack a trolley and they were quite close to each other and the customers.

On the news, we saw that large numbers of people had gone to the seaside for the day and congregated in amusement arcades and on the promenade, which seemed crazy because the guidelines are to stay 2 metres away from anyone who doesn't live with you, and avoid crowds. We knew the rules were going to have to be stricter and clearer - a lock-down.

Husband is learning the programmes to interact with his students online - give online lessons - there was a conference call with a bunch of teachers the other evening and they were all trying to figure out the right approach to online teaching.

I met Ros at the allotments - she is a retired doctor. She said she had had the call to go in and help the NHS, but she felt, as a child psychologist, she couldn't help much, so had refused.

Had an awful shock when Pippa G said the lock-down might include the allotments, and therefore she was putting her potatoes in! I went home and fetched my potatoes and S and F, who were bored, and instructed them on potato planting in the twilight. We also put in a line of strawberries that Bonnie from the plot behind had dug up and left in front of my hut. Everything was dry because it has been so sunny, and needed watering, so I got them doing that too.

The next day we took Frances to Euston in the car, because we had seen pictures of commuters on the tube absolutely squashed together and not following the guidelines because they couldn't, and they felt they must get to work. I gave Frances some medical gloves to wear on public transport. She took back the pasta she had brought only a couple of days before and some of the potatoes. She had been quite annoyed with us for shopping in small quantities and frequently instead of shopping in bulk at intervals. She is a terrifying critic of our behaviour! She had just settled a problem she had back at her house and in a way, I felt she had come home just so that she could handle that problem from a distance, and having had the confrontation that was necessary, she was free to return to where her real life is. In Hammersmith we saw a lot of people out walking in the street, mainly going into food shops, but passing by each other quite closely. However, there was not much traffic and the trip to and from Euston was easy.

Went to Waitrose for a big shop - this food should last the week, although S is consoling himself for boredom by constantly raiding the fridge. Waited in a queue stretching around the car park, in nice weather. Felt rather alienated by standing so far apart from anyone. Eventually, I found the shop had stocked up with eggs and they were still there, I took 18 which is more than I would usually take, but I could not replenish my tins of chickpeas and tomatoes. No problem as I had more. Interesting though that everyone wants those things that keep. Had to stand well back from the tills in a queue - I regretted not taking the self-checkout gun. Chatted with the girl on the checkout -a student just back from university. I felt very reassured that young people make good recoveries from COVID-19, but on that very day a 21-year old died from it.

The lock-down did not include allotments, and Michael Gove said that allotments were a healthy outdoor activity which they are, and it's not necessary to get close to anyone, but the problem is that our allotments are very exposed to the public and we lock the gates with a combination lock. Yesterday the committee spent nearly all the day composing an email to all members about keeping the site secure but taking great care when using the lock - wear gloves if you can and wash your hands afterwards but not in the water tanks. We have only one tap for washing and it's right up the other end from my gate. I have some medical gloves so I am OK. However, in spite of the very involved instructions we sent to our members, the gate had been left unlocked with the code showing on three occasions. The Treasurer said that we should take the locks off the gates or we might be responsible for killing someone. I sort-of agreed with him. I feel very worried about this. I could have sent the email but I am not the Secretary anymore - Leila is. So I looked at the site and found I could have given Leila the powers to send emails to everyone but I didn't!! I said it was up to the Treasurer because he has always set the site up for usage before and I didn't want to tread on his toes. I wondered if they would have a big fight - locks vs no locks - but if they did I didn't know about it, and eventually, Leila sent the email about locking being the priority, but wear gloves, take hand sanitizer and wash hands, etc.

Met my friend C at the allotments and told her that a young woman had complained to Tony about us being on other people's plots and standing too close together. (That was the day before when we went to the allotment shop and weighed out bags of Growmore and Potato Fertilizer.) We stood a long way apart but were able to chat. She is still tutoring! People still want their kids tutored although the exams have been cancelled until some unknown time.

Frances started working at the QE hospital yesterday, clerking work in the haematology department. Although she was told it would be paid work she now doesn't know whether she'll be paid or not. It is disorganised at the moment.

The government is making a 4,000-bed hospital at the Excel Centre in London. A construction worker posted a film showing the size of it - empty at present. it will take far longer than they say. (a week).

A and S went to the hut yesterday and started cleaning and throwing out rubbish there, which was well overdue, and they stacked up chairs in the bedroom. I am still hoping to have a party there on 26th July, although I know I shall probably have to cancel I think this summer would be a great time to do more than necessary repairs to the hut, but to actually improve the decor.

I need to move some of the spuds F put in the other evening because they are in the wrong bed - they are in the onion bed but right now I am going to go for a sort of run. My daily exercise while the weather is so nice.

Milkman by Anna Burns

I read this a few months ago.

It's a fun book and it's about a serious subject. What is it like to grow up amid sectarian violence? What is it like when deathmongers are your normal old neighbours? This book goes a long way towards telling you what it's like, but it's fun and inventive too.  Middle sister, our protagonist, feels threatened by a sexual predator she calls Milkman, although he is not a milkman. That is his code name. Milkman wants Middle Sister to get into his car. He makes subtle threats. Middle Sister knows what could happen - she has lost family members in this pseudo-war. She could fall apart with the stress of the situation ...

Like the rest of the neighbourhood, Middle Sister is secretive. She is mainly secretive because she doesn't want her mother to know she has a boyfriend. So she doesn't tell you her name, or anyone's name (Maybe Boyfriend) who matters to her. She doesn't want anyone identified.

Middle sister's understanding of what went on is acute. She knows that there are 2 sides to a story.

"In our district the renouncers-of-the state were assumed the good guys, the heroes, the men of honour, the dauntless, legendary warriiors, outnumbered, risking their lives, standing up for our rights, guerrilla-fashions, against all the odds. They were viewed in this way by most if not all in the dstrict, at least initially, before the idealistic type ended up dead, with growing reservations setting in over the new type, those tending towards the gangster style of renouncer instead. Along with the sea change in personnel came the moral dilemma for the "our side of the road" non renouncer and not very politicised person. This dilemma consisted of, once again, those inner contraties, the moral ambiguities, the difficulty of entering fully into the truth. Here were the Johns and Marys of this world, trying to live civilian lives as ordinarly as the political problems here would allow them, but becoming uneasy, no longer certain of the moral correctness of the means by which our custodians of honour were fighting for the cause. This was not just becasue of the deaths and the mounting deaths, but also the injuries, the forgotten damage, all that personal and provate suffering stemming from successful renouncer operations. And as the renouncers' power and assumption of power increased, so too, did the uneasiness of the Johns and Marys increase, regardless too, that the other side - "over there" - across the road" - acress the water" - would be hard at it, doing their own versions of destruction as well. There was also that day-to-day business of dirty laundry in public, and of the distict renouncers laying down their law, their prescripts, their ordinances plus punishments for any prceived infringements of them. There were beatings, brandings, tar and featherings, diappearances, black-eyed, unlti-bruised people walkng about with missing digits who most certainly had those digits only the day before. There were too, the impromptu courts held in the district's hutments, also in other disused building and houses specially friendly to the renouncers. There were the myriad methods our renouncers had for levying funds for their cause. Above all, there was the orgnisation's paranoia, their examination, interrogation and almost always dispatch of informants and of suspected informants, but until this discomfort with the inner contraries took hold of the Johns and Marys, the renouncers had constituted iconic noble fighters in pretty much the whole of the community's eyes. To the groupies of the paramilitaries however, - and this could be certain girls and women unable to grasp with mind and emotion any concept of a moral conflict - men who were in the renouncers signalled not just wonderful specimens of unblemished toughness, sexiness and maleness, but through attaining to relationship with them, these females could push for their own social and careerist ends."

She goes about walking and reading at the same time and she didn't intend this to attract attention. I admire this and I admire the fresh approach to writing that keeps you engaged with this book.

Yay, Middle Sister!!

Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald - the BBC in the War

When you read a novel like this it reminds you that a novel can do all sorts of things. It consists of characters interacting, usually. Usually, there is a main character whose sensibility is made clear to the reader or several such characters, and things happen to the characters and they change, possibly.

I am not sure this book is about any of the characters, who are employed by the BBC in the war. There are young women who act as assistants in the department of a middle-aged man, Sam, who is brilliant but not aware as he is obsessed with the technical difficulties of recording outside broadcasts. He never seems to go home. "Pacing to and fro like a bear astray, in a grove of the BBC's pale furniture... He wore a tweed jacket, grey trousers and one of the BBC's frightful house ties... Much of the room was taken up with a bank of turntables and a cupboard full of clean shirts." He likes holding the hands of the female assistants and telling them his troubles (his obsession with recording the life of the nation, the human voice) and he goes to sleep with his head on Vi's shoulder. Vi is the most reliable of the young girl assistants.

 He has a friend, Jeff, who is the Director of programme planning and is under terrible stress. We first meet him drinking double whiskies in the BBC canteen. He is described like this: "His face, with its dark eyebrows, like a comedian's but one who had to be taken seriously, was the best known in the BBC... DPP was homeless, in the sense of having several homes, none of which he cared about more than the others. There was a room he could use at the Langham, and then there were two or three women with whom his relationship was quite unsentimental, but who were not sorry to see him when he came. He never went to his house, because his third wife was still in it."

There is a war on, London is very hazardous, and someone gets pregnant. There are young female employees worried about boyfriends in the forces, and male employees waiting to be called up. They spend the day chatting, of course they do, and gossiping.

Broadcasting House in Langham Place

The BBC, in this novel, is sometimes a single entity. "The BBC knew that for a fact." It is housed in a building that looks like a ship, a great cruise liner.

Jeff, early in the novel, finds that his place at the BBC is liable to a re-shuffle, and he may be sent out of London, because he is invited to welcome a French general who wants to address the British nation, and surmising that the General wants to tell Britain to give up fighting the Germans, pulls the plugs on him, so the nation hears 10 minutes of silence instead. In a way, his action is entirely admirable, and if the Ministry of Information or the War Office had heard the French General's address they might well have stepped in to control the BBC themselves, which they never did.

"The BBC, in the face of the grave doubts of the Services, persisted obstinately in telling the truth in their own way."

But the Ministries want to blame Jeff for stepping in and pulling the plugs without any consultation with anyone.

"The BBC loyally defended their own. As a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn't too sure where next week's money was coming from, they had several different kinds of language, and could guarantee to come out best from almost any discussion. Determined to go on doing what they thought best without official interference, ..."

The Assistant Deputy Director-General feels that Jeff's nerves have been strained by planning the whole of the Home and the Forces Programming, and suggests he reads Cranford to soothe himself to sleep every night. "The whole notion was comforting, but in fact Jeff had never been nervous and was now arguably the calmest person in the whole building."

(It's strange to think that Hyde Park was full of young people lounging about, (as usual) specifically the Free French, who came in two groups which fought with each other, and at the same time there was an anti-aircraft battery there.)

Sam is furious with Jeff for not getting a recording of the General for the archives. All the political stuff passes him by. He's worried about the Archives - they have no recordings of Stukas, for example. Jeff has no secretary which allows him to ignore half his correspondence as not worth a reply.

I found myself researching to find out who might have been the original for "Jeff", but I found nothing. 

On the trail, in "Broadcasts from the Blitz" I find: 

"On the afternoon of September 7, 1940, nearly a thousand German planes, bombers escorted by fighters, darkened the skies over London. After a two-hour attack, another wave arrived. The principal targets were the docks along the Thames, and the Ministry of Home Security reported that 430 persons were killed and 1,600 were badly injured...

...For the next fifty-seven nights, London was hit again and again. For a while, the bombers came by day as well, but the Royal Air Force destroyed so many planes by daytime that by October a day-time raid was a rarity. When darkness fell, however, London was blasted. London had been heavily bombed earlier,...It was the relentlessness of the blitz that set it apart. It was the real test of Britain's ability to stand alone and survive. An estimated 20,000 tons of high explosive were dropped on London within nine months."

Quantities of metal beds are brought into the concert hall, which becomes a dormitory for staff who never go home, and tickets are issued to staff who need a bed for the night. People of all grades climb on each other's bunks. The snoring echoes off the walls.

You find first-hand descriptions of this here.

Here is the most beautiful paragraph in the novel, and indeed, in most books there are no paragraphs as beautiful.

As an institution that could not tell a lie, they were unique in the contrivances of gods and men since the Oracle of Delphi. As office managers, they were no more than adequate, but now, as autumn approached, with the exiles [the French, the Poles, the Czechs etc] crowded awkwardly into their new sections, they were broadcasting in the strictest sense of the word, scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe, in the certainty that more than half must be lost, some for the rook, some for the crow, for the sake of a few that made their mark. And everyone who worked there, bitterly complaining about the short-sightedness of their colleagues, the vanity of the newsreaders, the remoteness of the Controllers and the restrictive nature of the canteen's one teaspoon, felt a certain pride which they had no way to express, either then or since.

This comes about halfway through the novel. After this, a new character is introduced, and there is a romance. But before this romance, the novel is about a lowly BBC employee's view of London in wartime and it is a portrait of an organisation, which is unusual for a novel, and has that light, masterly touch one sometimes finds in Graham Greene or Muriel Spark.

There are two literary allusions which come to the surface right at the end of the novel. One is about Shakespeare's The Tempest, which had me casting about trying to see the novel as a reworking of the story of Prospero and Aerial, and the other is an allusion to T.S. Eliot - the main character says that Eliot (he knows him by sight) walks "in measure, like a dancer" and the title  of the book is from one of his great poems:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each

I do not think they will sing to me

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

In 1945 it had been bombed a few times and patched up.

There is also an American character called Mac, who broadcasts to the US, telling the Amercians how the English behave in the Blitz, and it is possible to cast him as Aerial, because of the way he magically turns up scattering oranges and cheeses amongst the staff, going on air to evoke the scenes of ravaged London, even broadcasting the sound of the bombing from the roof of the BBC, and breezes out again - and this made me research the BBC during the war. There was a famous young US broadcaster called Ed Murrow, who played this role in the Blitz, but he wasn't the only one, and Murrow actually lived in London for a couple of years before the war, so he didn't "fly in" the way this character does.
You can hear one of Ed Murrow's broadcasts on the BBC page here
Another possibility for the original of Mac is Quentin Reynolds.

Hampton Court again - winter tasks

The winter tasks continue to be quite hard.

Last week we were not needed in the morning as we had missed Ichiho - she had earlier gone to the woods to cut hazel branches, which we use to make support structures for beans and tomatoes. In the afternoon Hilary gave us a lift in a large van to the coppice in Home Park where we grow the hazel stools. It was quite complicated to get there and I don't think I could find it again. The Palace has a store there where we keep equipment for events, like barriers. Our job was simple - to pick up hazel branches from the pile and carry them to the van, and pile them up in the back. As the pile mounted in the back of the van the job became more difficult. The wood was so long many branches stuck out at the back. We got a lift back to the Kitchen Garden and unloaded into a big pile in the area where we keep compost and stores.

Coppiced hazel after cutting

This week I started with Maxine on digging in the clover, a winter manure, which will have to be done several times. There are plenty of worms at work in the soil which should be breaking the plants down but the plants are big and tough and are not breaking up very well, in fact many plants had recommenced growing. I resorted to digging holes and burying the plants upside down. I'm not sure when my method will be discovered. It's probably the only way of stopping the clover from growing again though.

Ichiho and Chris worked on cutting the hazel stems, which were where we left them last week, and sorting them into bundles by size, and then standing them up in the cubby hole where they are kept. All the old ones have vanished. There was nothing wrong with the old ones. It is all very odd. There seems to be no point except that the coppice needed cutting.

This passed the time well until lunch. Took a portion of my soup for lunch and had it in the mess room. Afterwards we had to barrow away the cuttings from our gooseberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants, which were all pruned last week. We had no more room left for all the old stalks and we have a great many bundles of newly cut hazel brush to keep in the cubby. So we trundled our wheelbarrows to the gardeners' yard several times, and threw the sticks in the trailer. We filled the trailer completely.

Blackcurrant showing cut stems

Then Ichiho helped Maxine with digging in the clover and Chris and I did some desultory hoeing. It was a pity we couldn't learn to do the pruning but perhaps it will happen next year.

Redcurrant