Wednesday 30th: Mechelen’s Diary – February 1941

First of all, perhaps, I should say something about the senior officer of this unit, for context. Colonel Davids is a long-serving officer who knows the unit well, and who is on good and friendly terms with the senior officers of the other units, and with the officers of the higher command structures. He is reasonably articulate and professional, and he speaks in terms that the other officers recognise and approve. He gives the impression that he is focused resolutely on the prosecution of the war, and in the efficiency and relentlessness of his unit’s fighting power – to the exclusion of all other considerations. He gives the impression of being an honest, simple man, a non-political operator.

However, these impressions, so dominant amongst the senior officers, are not reflected in his relationships with his unit’s troops, or with junior officers. Junior officers find him weak and indecisive, and I have often heard it said that he will not make decisions, deferring them until the necessity to act is undeniable, or creating a badly compromised fudge that leaves an ugly, intractable mess for other people to clear up later. He is weak on detail, narrow in focus, and woeful in following up on his commitments. He is ineffective as a strategic thinker, and can only focus on one aspect of an issue at a time – I believe that he is intellectually incapable of comprehending the complexities of many tactical and combat situations. Furthermore, he is obviously uninterested in administration and systematisation, and his disinterest creates a culture of sloppiness and recalcitrance in his administrative and headquarters staff. He is totally reliant on his subordinate officers for the delivery of results, and they privately resent his ineffectiveness and grandstanding. His leadership is virtually non-existent: he relies upon a few skilled juniors to make all the pieces of the machine work together. Since he is also incapable of acting in cases of poor performance, his unit has a seam of weak officers running through it. These officers’ more capable peers resent the weaklings’ presence and incompetence, and bridle at their senior officer’s vacillation, and at their own ability to bring about change. There is, in short, a poisoned layer of resentment and ineptitude beneath the surface of this apparently effective machine.

Many of the unit’s troops (as well as many members of sister units) are openly contemptuous of the Colonel. It is shaming that such a senior officer can be so little regarded by his subordinates. The contemptuous nicknames for him – [a, b, c] – are used openly, especially when drink has been taken by the troops.

(c. 430 words)

Mathilde, Monday, Home

She pauses with her hand on the gate. She can tell that there’s something wrong, but she can’t identify what it is. Most of her body has stopped involuntarily, but her eyes are busy, the lids blinking rapidly while she looks and looks at the house.

It’s the lights, of course: all the lights are on, upstairs and down, and most of the windows are still uncurtained. Aunt [Y] is irritatingly predictable about her curtain closing routine – as soon as the dusk has made a silhouette of the houses opposite she does her round, swishing everything shut against the night, even in the summer heat. Mathilde surmises that it’s some generational thing about privacy and not being visible in your own house from the outside. It’s not something that she’d feel comfortable discussing, since to ask about it might imply some kind of criticism of her aunt – and she could never criticise her aunt and uncle, as they have done so much for her.

Her heart starts that stupid, over-excited thudding, the precursor of panic that she knows so well. She presses her palm against a sharpish angle of wood on the gate rail, and does her slow breathing routine. It’s probably nothing – like when we had the water leak last year. On that occasion she had arrived home and found a strange dark van parked outside the house, and strange men sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea. Very disconcerting at first, but just a stupid passing worry when seen in retrospect. She’s never had anyone close to her die, and she dreads the prospect of Aunt Iris or Uncle Pieter dying. She especially fears how she will feel. She fears – what? She doesn’t know what she dreads, but she dreads the act of finding out. It’s that unknownness that disconcerts her – knowing that, some day, she will be in a space of time, and a definite location, confronted with the fact of death, and finding herself having to act, to take responsibility; but knowing too that she won’t be able to rehearse what it feels like.

She can’t think about it for too long. If she does, all the energy and enthusiasm seems to drain out of her, and the world greys and seems hopeless, evoking a similar emptiness and ennui to the one she feels when she travels into the city centre on a Saturday afternoon and is confronted by the sight of the city’s teenagers at large in the streets and shopping malls: that sinking feeling, the feeling that everything is going to shit, that there’s no cause for optimism – that this inarticulate, spotty, drink- and drugs-ridden generation, shouting and swearing in feral gangs under the bright lights of the shopping centre are the future of the nation. That thought makes her feel that the past was a waste of time, that bequeathing the progress of the past to these [equivalent of current lazy ‘chav’ or ‘pikey’ slang] means the end of something. [something here about the relative peace, harmony, community of the past – an idealised picture of her youthful vision of the world/of the nation…]

In the lighted windows, she can see that there are too many people in the house. So something must have happened.

She breathes out deeply through her nose, says “Fuck it,” aloud, and walks up to the open font door. Aunt Iris is in the hallway, a mug of tea gripped in her hand. She’s holding a plate of sandwich crumbs and pork pie crusts in her other hand. She turns and sees Mathilde’s frowning face.

“Oh, Mattie – there you are. It’s all right, but there’s been an accident.”

“Who to?”

“This morning. Uncle Jan. He’s in the hospital, and they think he’s going to be OK. Piet talked to the doctor just now, and he said it looks OK – as far as they can tell. But it looks OK.”

“What’s wrong with him? Who’s there with him?”

“There’s no-one there at the moment – everyone’s come back here for some tea. A few of us have been there most of the day.”

“Uh huh. How is he injured?”

“He’s got shock and hypothermia. They think he fell in the canal – or was mugged – ”

“Mugged? But not hurt?”

“No, they don’t think so – just some bruises. But he hasn’t been able to talk to anyone yet, so we don’t know. We’ll have to wait until he wakes up.”

“Is anyone going back there tonight? Can I come?”

“I don’t know if there’s much point, love – they said they’re going to keep him knocked out overnight, so I don’t think there’s much point being there, really.”

“OK.”

“Although…they might want some stuff taking in for him – some nightclothes and smelly stuff and things.”

“I could get that, then.”

“Would you, love? You wouldn’t mind?”

“Course not.”

Iris gives Mathilde a quick smile and pooches out her lips for a kiss.

Mechelen's Diary. Feb. 1941

It is interesting to see how people act in extreme conditions. Sometimes you think that you can predict how a certain person will behave in a particular set of circumstances. This is especially true of officers and the soldiers that they lead, I believe. It is one of the principles of traditional military training that, in the interests of discipline and efficiency, you reduce an individual’s ability – and inclination – to act as an individual. In our modern training, this principle is retained, even though we do encourage a high degree of initiative and autonomy: but this initiative and autonomy can only be carried out within the context of the conquering of the individual will by the individual soldier himself, and where the soldier’s desires are subsumed within the larger mass of the unit. In these contexts, we like to think that we can predict how our men will be. I certainly used to subscribe to that belief, and it’s a belief that I have retained through the extremes of combat in both the eastern and western theatres of operations. (For example: at our officer’s meetings and combat briefings, we often discuss which NCOs and squads should play which part in an operation, based on their record, characteristics and response patterns. This is simply good management, in my view.)

However, in the face of the evidence I have gleaned in the recent campaign, I am starting to modify this view. This is rather a worrying development for me – and for the army itself – since it is indicative of a coarsening of behaviour and of a potential drift towards unpredictability and indiscipline. If we do not establish acceptable and predictable grounds of behaviour, even in the most extreme and difficult circumstances, we risk losing the discipline and rigour that have been the hallmark of our corps, and of all of the campaigns that we have pursued these past three years.
A recent example springs to mind amongst the men of our sister unit, the (unit identifier deleted). This unit served alongside us in P and F, and many of their officers and men were decorated or mentioned in dispatches. I would rate their fighting qualities and discipline as equal to my unit’s throughout those campaigns.

However, as I say, in the recent occupation and mopping up actions in L., this unit, in my opinion (and, I might say, in the opinion of many of my colleagues) revealed itself in a very different light. This can only be remedied by swift action from its officers and, if necessary, from the senior commanders (I believe a statement will be forthcoming soon in this respect).

(c. 1270 words)

Monday 28th: Mathilde, Monday, School Trip

(Some ‘pick ups’ – like they do in the movies when they go back and shoot some new stuff that they didn’t think of before…)
[Slave market] The slave market precincts have undergone a recent renovation, and all the original flag stones, bricks and mortar have all been sand blasted and, where necessary, re-pointed or re-laid. Fixed tables and metal mountings for sun shades have sprouted amongst the stones, and elegant glass and brushed steel wind breaks have been artfully arranged to screen off discrete restaurant spaces and shaded seating areas.

The stones now have a scoured look, and sawdust and cement dust linger in the joints and interstices, lending the area a fresh, scrubbed air of coarse rejuvenation, like an ageing person whose had a layer of skin stripped off and thinks that their raw pinkness gives them a healthy glow.

From the seventeenth century onwards, slaves from the east and south-east of Europe flowed up the wide rivers and canals to the ports of the empire and thence to the great slave markets spread across Europe – Antwerp, Amsterdam, Delft, Hamburg – from where they were diffused throughout the continental empire, and onwards overseas. How many moustachioed faces, dark-haired women, and snotty-faced children had passed through this now-bright square of stone? [She catches herself thinking in stereotypes – (the beamer = the drug dealer, the gentle south asian, the heartless, unreadable far eastern – the stereotypes of my childhood and youth), knowing that these were the kind of shorthand attitudes/thinking that allowed the slave trade to flourish for so long: seeing these people not as individuals but as representatives of a type.]

While the kids sit down and make their painstakingly delineated sketches of the brick- and stonework, Mathilde and the other teachers treat themselves to coffee from the stall, warming themselves in the fug of fumes: coffee, hot sugary doughnuts, cinnamon, fried onions. The stall, seemingly like all the others across the square – across the city – is staffed by a pair of Slavic-looking Easterners: she with olive skin, black hair, and startlingly delicate eyes and lashes, he heavier-set, his shirt untucked, and sporting the stereotypical thick black moustache. Mathilde notices that his fingers have the burnt umber cast of the heavy smoker.

Three hundred years ago, these people’s ancestors would have been dragging their way across the stones to the slave pens, and [this ethnic group] still occupy the lowest berths of the economy, grinding out their thankless work in the low paid, low status roles that the white working class started turning their noses up at in the post-war years, when new technologies and the [burgeoning] consumer culture created new, better-paid [sectors in the economy].
Mathilde remembers the open contempt that her family and friends used to express about the Easterners, [dismissing them as two-dimensional economic ciphers, devoid of individuality, emotional weight, or inner life. How easy it was to dismiss whole swathes of people in those days, when you could look at someone and not see them as a human being at all, based just on the colour of their skin, or the way they wore their facial hair, or the style of their clothing. It makes her realise how far this society has come in thirty-odd years: the common linguistic currency of abuse and ridicule has become unacceptable in mainstream society, although you’ll still find it spent freely in some contexts; some of her kids, for example, come out with shockingly extreme and profane statements – things that they’ve obviously heard at home or in the company of their relatives [reify, reify!]]. She consciously tries to make eye contact with the [barristas], smiles warmly, and leaves them an overly generous tip. [At some level, this is her personal compensation effort – emotionally, it tries to make amends for years of physical, verbal and economic abuse/mistreatment/exploitation. Something also about the structural/cultural embedding of inequality…but in novel-form, not this fecking pseudo-undergraduate essay style…]

[Going Home]
When she gets off the bus near home, she’s still full of a sense of well-being derived from coffee, cake, and the unnecessary purchase of three lovely books from the warm, brightly-lit bookshop near the coffee bar. She loves the weighty swing of the books in their plastic bag, and she swings that weight as she walks along the familiar streets near her home. The traffic’s tyres slur on the tarmac, another comforting sound from her urban upbringing: it reminds of summer nights spent playing out in the streets until night fell, when she would suddenly feel the profound tiredness of [a full day’s play] tugging at her, and a painful hoarseness [lead poisoning? Exhaust fume toxicity?] scratching at the back of her throat; it was then that she would crave the smells of their own kitchen, and the feel of her dad’s overalls against her face and chest when she hugged him, her nose up to his chest. His overalls would smell of oil and detergent, and he’d have a subtler aura made of aftershave and the fat from his fried supper. [need to work this up some more for emotional/sensory conviction – how warm, secure, safe – and loved – he made her feel, despite her tiredness and fractiousness].

The memory of that summer evening smell and that intimacy is intoxicatingly nostalgic for her: when she’s already feeling sad or anxious, this kind of memory will have an achingly tragic quality, and will be accompanied by a sense of a great wind blowing through vast empty spaces; a sense of how terminally lost the past is, and how directionless and empty her life has become, and how she will never know the certainty, security and possibility of those pre-adolescent times.

On other occasions, though, when she’s feeling satisfied and confident – like tonight – that nostalgia is an empowering thing, and it reminds her that she has lived through good times, and known pleasure and love and intimacy. In these contexts, it will bring an unselfconscious smile of pleasure to her face: she’s a good person, with well-rounded emotional responses and experiences – someone who is self-aware, ironic, loveable, and who recognises what’s important and beautiful in the world [that simple joy of being in the world and warming to it…].

She turns the last corner, into her home street. The street lights mark the usual flight path home – amber ingots against the sky’s [deep blue-purple] backcloth – and the combined noise of cars, TVs, hoovers, voices and stereos hums in the background, while her boot soles clunk and echo on the pavement. As she lays her hand on the rough wooden top rail of the front gate, she can smell fat frying, and sausages and bacon: the evening smells of home.

(c. 1100 words)

Saturday 26th: Mathilde, Monday, School Trip

Mariette worked in lots of different media, but the paintings and needlework left Mathilde cold. She was more interested in the three dimensional creations: the paper and cardboard cottages and castles, the mermaids and shepherdesses sculpted from modelling clay, and – the thing that both fascinated and appalled her – aunt Mariette’s long-term project, the shell lamp. This was Mariette’s variation on a common theme of those times, which consisted of taking a large wine bottle (the wide, squat, shallow ones were a popular choice), drilling a hole through the base, and attaching a light bulb fitting to the neck before plastering the outside of the bottle with [DIY] filler and embedding sea shells into the wet filler. What made Mariette’s version unique was the range and richness of the sea shells she had at her disposal. These shells, which had edged their way up maybe a third of the bottle’s height in the year that the project had been in progress, were exotic and varied, the fruit of the final years of Jan’s work in the [diplomatic service], when his postings had taken him and Mariette to the Far East and the Southern Ocean. The unused shells in waiting are kept in a large old [QS] tin that still exudes a faint smell of chocolate when you squeeze the lid off it. There are spiral shells and shells like unicorn’s horns, bright red or blue shells and shells that are so pale that they’re almost translucent; there are ridged shells and spiky ones, and some with what look like jewels inlaid in them. Compared to the dull colours and limited forms that Mathilde has collected for herself on the northern sea shore, these are amazingly [exotic] and glamorous, and they speak of a sunlit world of flawless turquoise skies and white-sanded beaches shaded with palm trees – a world that she can only imagine, and which she can’t possibly expect to visit: those kind of places are not for ‘the likes of us’, but only for rich people and the favoured few who – like Uncle Jan – manage to escape from the [rigidly-defined confines of their culture].

Mathilde likes to spread out the shells on aunt Mariette’s work table and arrange them in complex symmetrical patterns. She spent a happy couple of hours doing just that last summer when she stayed with her aunt and uncle for a week while mum recovered from her operation, and she remembers her deep satisfaction at creating a beautifully symmetrical double spiral in blue, white and red. [Thinking about the finished perfection of the shape makes her feel sad – it’s gone, and she can never bring it back.

She turns over the shells that have their inside faces uppermost: she licks her fingers and uses the moisture to pick the shells up, her damp skin clinging to the glossy inner surfaces. She tries to get a shell to adhere to the end of each finger simultaneously, like a plate-spinner on a television variety show. Her fingers gradually take on a salty, sandy taste, and her tongue starts to feel gritty. [make sure that you add something here that very clearly demonstrates how these sense memories are tied into a particular emotional state/stage of her childhood development…something that channelled her creativity perhaps…a time when she was innocently imaginative, that beautiful period when you still bring an innocent and hopeful eye to everything, and when you can enjoy simple, unironic admiration for other people, and seek to emulate them without shame or self-consciousness…pre-self-consciousness, that’s the thing to zoom in on here, I think…]

The shell lamp – in its finished form – is now in Mathilde’s bedroom at home. After Mariette died, uncle Jan asked Mathilde what she would like as a keepsake, and she chose the lamp: [it’s so tangible, and has so many sense memories bound up in it…] she’s got mixed feelings about it now, a complex combination of love and regret, guilty snobbishness, and memories (invented?) of aunt Mariette in a white cotton dress and a straw sunhat, bending down over her with a smile on her face, surrounded by sunlight. The lamp is rather embarrassing now, in some ways – it looks so naff and 1970s, cheap and gauche in a clumsy, unsophisticated way. Nobody – or nobody with any taste – would dream of making such a thing now and displaying it in their living room: it has gone the way of bull fight posters and Elvis mirrors. Terminally kitsch. But it’s a connection with her aunt, and with her aunt’s past. It contains something of Mariette, something of her creativity and charm, her eye for detail and balance, and her commitment to getting the quality of her work right. She couldn’t help that this form of ‘artwork’ was inherently awful; it was a thing of its time, and there is no way that Mariette could have stepped outside of the cultural norms of her day and seen this lamp as people see it now. It has her innocence and open-mindedness embedded in it along with the shells. [there’s something here…an echo of the ‘all products of our environment and culture’ thing that chimes with (i) Jan’s upbringing and adherence to the state’s racist/persecutory norms, and (ii) the formation of Mathilde’s emotional habits/behaviours, and how she is still the prisoner of them…the difficulty of recognising and escaping your programming – especially the stuff that went in so early and so subtly, all that implicit stuff that no-one ever taught you explicitly…].

[…]

It’s over. The kids have all departed with the other teachers, and she’s made it through the day without a disaster. It actually went quite well, she thinks. She knows that, once she’s had a glass of wine tonight, she’ll half-convince herself that she should do this kind of thing more often. She also knows that, in the morning, her sense of euphoric relief will have dissipated, and she will know – with the conviction of the whole of her sunken heart – that it will be a long time before she has the confidence and mental strength to repeat the exercise. She’ll dread being asked to do it again by the head teacher, and she knows that she’ll be evasive and non-committal, pleading more urgent necessities and prior commitments.
For now, though, she’s going to savour her sense of achievement and her relief at the ordeal being over. She heads for her favourite coffee bar, crossing the traffic-heavy street in the dusk, breathing in the rich chemical smell of exhaust fumes, enjoying the vividness of the lights and the flow of people, and anticipating a hot milky coffee and a luxuriously overfilled Danish pastry.

(c. 1100 words)

Friday 25th: Mathilde, Monday, School Trip

Immortalised and fixed in the cultural consciousness by this apocryphal utterance, the Princess Louise (always with that obligatory definite article) began her after-mauling life as a generous, humble benefactress, scarred terribly in the physical sense but transformed and liberated mentally: the standard interpretation is that her new physical hideousness and disability lent her a spiritual and moral stillness and strength; from this position, in the cool, revealing light of the spacious palace rooms, she was able to reflect on her life and review her previous behaviours, and, from that analysis, resolve to use the time that remained to her to better purpose, and in pursuit of the common good. She thus became a lasting symbol: a symbol of how a person – and a people – could change, turning away from a selfish and venal life and (despite personal hardship and physical suffering) embrace a life of generosity and philanthropy.

Inside the cathedral the teachers corral the children into an aisle, and Mathilde directs their gaze to the stained-glass window that was dedicated in the Princess Louise’s honour in [date]. The bright chunks of refracted light play on the children’s faces as their eyes move from image to image in the big leaded pane, which is dominated by the cowled Princess handing over alms to a mixed congregation of the picturesquely needy: the elderly, the lame, the blind, the orphaned. The Princess’s face is tastefully obscured by the pale blue sweep of her cowl, but her single visible eye is dark and reverentially upturned towards heaven, from where a cleansing white light falls upon the idealised scene. She is an image of selflessness, self-knowledge and self-sacrifice, and she has been the moral bogeywoman invoked to shame the generations of ungrateful, disobedient, selfish, surly children who have questioned why they had to do anything that wasn’t to their taste or convenience. She’s the unimpeachably pious goody-goody and bete blanc of the modern teenager, just as she was in Mathilde’s household when she was passing through those difficult adolescent years after her parents’ divorce.

[Her father eventually leaving in the Autumn of <1974>, the day before – something that fixes it for her at a precise historical moment…this is the important continuation of the story of her {my…} emotional makeup… {{In the morning, how there’s sense/smell of her father’s usual shaving cream/aftershave/presence in the cold grey bathroom when she’s getting ready for school: no sense of her father having been there that morning…that puzzling space and absence, as if the house has somehow got bigger, changed shape. (Think of the bathroom at Northolt…)}}]

The children are all looking at her, waiting for her continue [she’d gone off into a ‘remembering her parents splitting up reverie – which always makes her feel sad and nostalgic, and yet determined (for the nth time…) to try and overcome the emotionally hobbling behaviours that continue to be the legacy of this period…].

[…]

The cathedral is becoming busier, with the crowds of tourists outnumbering the small band of irritated believers, and the noise level is rising, the hum of murmured conversations overlaying the squeak of shoe soles and the echoed hush that’s the base sound of the building’s cavernous interior. The children are allowed to light tremulous candles of tribute to the Princess Louise, and then they’re moved along to their final destination for the day: [the baths? the nat. hist. Mus.? Sci Mus? Zoo?…zoo would provide an opportunity for the kids to be off doing something that M isn’t supervising, and an opportunity for her to drop into a Jan/Mariette-centred reverie…perhaps zoo-based, then shading into memories of the ‘shell lamp’ at their house (all part of the same summer holiday visit?) – this could bring me back to her relationship with Jan, and prepare the ground for when (after her positive/surprised reflections on the day) she gets home and the house is full of people talking about him…]

[…]

[Her relief and amazement that it (the river trip) all went so well. The returning power of self-belief, and realising how ‘silly’ her worries have all been. (Everything turned out OK in the end, as usual. It wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be – as usual. She surprised herself by being competent and enjoying herself – as usual.)] [cycle =Fear; Enforced action, overcoming/ignoring/despite fear; Relief and resurgent self-belief.]

[Aggregates/something mineral in sacks scraping heavily up the brick walls of a canal-side warehouse…]

The sound of the [?] in the rough hessian [?] sacks [scraping] against the brick as the little crane jerks them up the side of the warehouse is evocative of shingle being tumbled by waves on a beach: a sloshy, weighty, wet scrunch, with a suggestion of grit, and of shiny surfaces scraping over each other in the dark. She imagines the gritty feel of sand on surf-smoothed stones, and the salty, fishy smell of crab fragments and shells collected on childhood beach walks, and remembers the mixed delicacy and knobbliness of the bags of shells in Aunt Mariette’s workroom.

Whenever she visited Aunt Mariette and Uncle Jan with her parents, she looked forward to being able to slip away from the adults once they had sat down in the ever-chilly lounge with their cups of tea and too-small pieces of insubstantial sponge cake. The bus journey over would always be a tight-lipped, aching buttocked affair: her mother would be picking at stray hairs and bits of fluff on Mathilde and her father’s clothes, fussing at Mathilde’s hair, and – always at least once per journey – spitting on her sweet-perfumed handkerchief and wiping at the corners of her daughter’s lips, where a tiny glob of marmalade or speck of toast had anchored themselves during the family’s rushed, tense breakfast. The bus journey would be conducted in silence, with Mathilde knowing that her parents would both be so moody and irritable that even the most innocuous of comments or questions could invoke an industrial strength nag or admonition. When they arrive at her aunt and uncle’s house, her mother will tug at hems and straighten lapels before ringing the door bell. Mathilde once received a shockingly sharp slap to the back of her leg and a hissed “Pack it in!” when she dared to run her fingers over the pale blue paint that was flaking away from part of the front door frame; there were still surprised, indignant tears in her eyes when Aunt Mariette, typically [70s] elegant in her nylon trouser suit and multicoloured hooped woollen cardigan, opens the door and smilingly welcomes them. Mathilde remembers the guilty feeling she had as she sat in her relative’s parlour, so close to her aunt and uncle, and with the dusty residue of her misdemeanour evident under her fingernails, and dry on her fingertips when she rubbed them together surreptitiously in the shadowed space between her leg and the side of the capacious armchair.

After sitting passively for a few minutes, sipping at Aunt Mariette’s milk-weak tea, Mathilde would always ask if she could ‘go to the toilet’. Upstairs, where the stilted, low-toned voices of the grown-ups barely carried, she would tiptoe along the landing and gently ease the workroom door open, where Aunt Mariette’s works in progress were arranged along the worktop […]

(c. 1200 words)

Wednesday 23rd: Mathilde, Monday, School Trip

Mathilde’s family had done their bit in the old days of the Empire, too: Uncle Jan goes without saying, of course, with his years in the Imperial Service, and there was great-granddad Thomas (seen by Mathilde only in a single picture), who worked in the engine room of one of the long-distance steam ships at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, working the Far East route; every [what’s their bloody surname?] household has a fragment of Thomas’s life from those days – delicately inlaid wooden boxes, tiny ivory carvings of animals with garnet eyes, and the ubiquitous willow pattern plates.

Then there are the other uncles of the Eastern war generation: there are four or five of them left, their averaged grey hair thinning now and turning white [they still use yellowish hair oil, as that generation tend to do], and they always end up clustering together at funerals and wedding receptions, pint mugs in hands, bitching about the officers who led them and the vindictive NCOs who made their barrack lives miserable. For them, the Eastern War wasn’t about good against evil, or a battle for civilisation against a ‘barely human’ Eastern horde: it was the opportunity to wangle yourself an easy life, to profit as much as possible, to take the piss out of authority and prick the pompous, and to come out with the upper hand in every encounter with your supposed superiors. In this story, wit, laziness and cunning were to be admired, and victory was achieved by the involuntary sacrifices of the salt of the earth masses, almost in spite of their efforts; and yet, despite this solid body of cynicism and blather, there was also a rigid pride in what they had done, and what it meant to the history of the country – ‘their finest hour’. These men could morph in a moment from open-mouthed guffaws to fixed-jawed, sombre nodding as they considered (i) the time when Billy [x]’s eyebrows were burnt off when he stood too close to the door of the church he was petrol-bombing, and (ii) Billy’s stupid death, late in the war, when he fell under the wheels of one of his own unit’s trucks. [How their war was about the continuation of their class experiences, and the solidarity of their little subculture…stratifications of class, geography etc…the unofficial story].

The barge has passed through the ring of warehouses and into the channel that skirts the Central Square, where the cathedral and the other great buildings of state flank the vast flag stoned area, which is thronged with tourists and market stalls, and edged with café awnings. The children are scheduled to alight here for a tour of the historic square: this is where Mathilde thinks the teachers will have the most trouble maintaining the party’s cohesion and interest.
They start with the slave market. [remember to introduce some of the Schamaesque colour, atmosphere and enthusiasm that she craves, but which she can’t deliver for the children herself…]

“The stone steps you just climbed up are the same ones that generations of slaves would have climbed up when they arrived from the lands in the East. They would have travelled by ship along the Baltic coast, and then travelled down the river and canal on littler boats until they reached the dockside here. The slaves came here mostly between 1650 and 1850 – about 5 million people in all.”

“Were there children, miss?” asks Natacha (who is the child always guaranteed to supply Mathilde with some interaction or stimulus: she’s the student that every teacher craves – the one who breaks the silence and opens up the possibility of dialogue.

“Yes, the slaves were men, women and children – all kinds of people – even children younger than you are now. Children of your age were especially sought after by the slave traders, as they were usually fit, and healthy, and easy to train for different jobs. When we get to the museum later, you’ll be able to see some of the things that the slaves brought with them from their homelands – clothes, shoes, toys, things to adorn themselves with, all sorts of things.
“The slaves would be tied or chained together so that they couldn’t run away, so they’d have to walk slowly and carefully up the steps and then across the square to the slave market, which used to stand just over there – where that long brick wall runs now. The market was as big as four football fields, and there were many merchants who had ordered the slaves from the eastern lands. They would line up their groups of slaves in their little pens and people would come to look at them and choose which ones they wanted to buy.”

The old slave market, she knows from her reading, was a place of unparalleled misery, where the sick and the injured would lie in their own excrement on a scattering of straw while the slave merchants concentrated on touting their more saleable goods to their punters. The market place would have been dirty, crowded and noisy, pungent with the smells of piss and shit, vomit, decaying meat, frying onions, spilt milk and beer, wood smoke and fish – all the thousands of smells of the burgeoning proto-capitalist economy and its material outputs. It must have been terrifying for some poor easterner who’d only ever known their distant rural village and who had never seen buildings the size of the (old) cathedral or the (new) town hall.

[…?? NB – prefigurations of the racist assumptions and stereotypes that fed this society over hundreds of years, informing the development of the militarist, racially hierarchical superiority that permeated the Empire at its height…]

There’s a story [apocryphal?] told of the (nineteen year old) Princess Louise in the 17th century. She’d take a daily walk from the Royal Palace (on the far side of the wide green gardens beyond the Stock Exchange) with her entourage of ladies in waiting and opulently-uniformed (slashed breeches of purple and yellow…) royal guards. She’d make her way around the fringes of the market, paying particular attention to the slave market precinct, where she would examine the slaves, always on the look-out for exotic or disfigured new arrivals that she could to her own retinue, which she liked to leaven with ‘curiosities and grotesques’ for the entertainment of her family, friends and visiting [dignitaries]. There was a real menagerie next to the slave market, where wild exotic creatures from the Empire’s far corners could be seen and bought – parrots, monkeys, slow-moving fat mammals that clung to branches, glamorous equine and bovine quadrupeds, and big cats.

“The Princess Louise was examining a new slave that she wanted to bring to work for her in the palace, and she was waving her arm as she told her friends about the duties she thought this new slave would be able to perform in her household. Unfortunately, her long sleeve of rich red silk caught on the bars of one of the zoo cages and, before her servants could untangle it, the leopard in the cage had seen it caught there, and it came across and grabbed hold of it. The cat was powerful enough to drag the poor Princess Louise to the ground, and drag her arm inside the cage. Unfortunately the poor Princess Louise could not free herself, even though her people struck out at the creature with their sticks and cried out for the zoo keeper to come and help her. By the time the creature was beaten off, the Princess Louise was badly injured, and her beautiful young face was mauled and scarred by the creature’s claws. But, as she was carried away to the doctors at the palace, she insisted that the wild creature must not be harmed – “I am to blame, spare the vicious beast.”

(c 1300 words)

Tuesday 22nd: Mathilde, Monday, School Trip

Mathilde knows two stories about the history of the city and its waterways, two stories that overlay and lap over each other, sometimes revealing things, and sometimes obscuring. The first story is the one that she has learned with her body, senses, and emotions: the story that her family have taught her, the one she’s learned sitting on her relatives’ shoulders, the one she’s glimpsed from her bike, the one she’s constructed from family photographs, anecdotes and misheard conversation; the story she’s shared with her friends growing up, and which is hidden from everyone outside her peer group; the one she’s experienced and felt, and which she can speak of with conviction and authority. The second story is the one she’s learned from books, teachers, politicians, art galleries, grand buildings and statues: the sanctioned story that the nation state tells about its values and its history.

They coincide, often, those two stories, but she still feels the tension between them when she’s telling the kids something – some fact or narrative – that coexists near a junction where the stories diverge or mesh. Which interpretation to choose? The conservative, surface-smoothing conventionality, or the sanctimony-puncturing personal aside that reveals a grittier, more multi-faceted reality beneath the even planes of the well-worn platitude? The mess and inconclusiveness of lived reality, or the idealised closed loops of the traditional narratives of improving material wealth and health, the unstoppable upward curves of progress and civilisation, the morally neutral and invincible dissolution of the world in the universal acid of capitalism?

What to tell the kids? How much to give away? How much complexity and ambiguity to include? Along with the moral dilemmas of objectivity/subjectivity, and of abusing her position of authority, she worries about tainting their innocent vision with the dirty pollution and ugliness of the world, and about the danger of painting an unflattering picture of a country and history that she genuinely loves, and which she considers – despite its failings and its half-closeted skeletons – to be the acme of freedom, liberality and democracy.

And yet, and yet…there’s always the pull of the truth, and her desire for sincerity and authenticity, and for even-handedness. As the barge moves down the river between non-descript black warehouse walls, smoke burbling from its little chimney, she’s thinking about the militia man opposite the café, thinking about how he abused the power invested in him, using naked aggression to threaten and cow her – to say nothing of the brutal mistreatment of the Russian. If she was half as moral and courageous as she likes to think she is, she wouldn’t have scurried back into the safe anonymity and distance of the café interior: no, she’d have said something – some intelligent, measured, non-aggressive and yet penetrating comment that would have made the militia man feel both stupid and ashamed. (She’s always lived – personally and intimately – in a world where intelligence and wit hold the whip hand: where people never resort to violence, but instead are disarmed by the superior intelligence of other people. The militia man, she knows, doesn’t live in that kind of a world. Despite her resentment of the unfairness of might being right, she knows that is an unanswerable authority. She must keep silent: her liberal, impotent, defeated silence [rooted in her lack of self-regard and her terrible fear of rejection??])

The warehouse walls pale, sprout satellite dishes, glass-fronted balconies, and expensive wood trim as the river widens and opens out into one of the old basins: docks in the heart of the city where barges and small ships could unload their cargoes from around the Empire and feed their goods straight into the burgeoning markets of the 17th century metropole. This particular dock, she tells the children, specialised in tobacco and ivory: the freshly-imported goods, smelling of the sea journey and of the lands where they originated (she leaves out the less-savoury smells that she knew would accompany goods and crews on those killing journeys), those goods were hauled straight out of the cargo holds by wall-mounted cranes – look up, to the left of that red-painted panel, and you can see the mounting block and the arm (the jib) that swings out over the water; the cranes swung the barrels and bales onto the projecting wooden platforms [technical name?], where toiling labourers would heave the goods into the warm, dark interiors of the warehouses. Then rich merchants would come and agree the prices for the goods, and sell them on to the people at the markets that are on the other side of the warehouses – we’ll visit one of the remaining markets later.

In this picture, the Empire was the world’s first economic superpower, an honest broker that took the risks to open up the world to trade, as part of a civilising mission that enabled the growth of the world’s wealth and the spread of the values of classical liberalism and democracy: everyone could be equal in a meritocracy of wealth: it was just an indisputable fact that there were some people and groups that were more equal than others, and these were the groups that the nation had to treat with; to do anything else would have been to interfere with the divine and profound order of nature – not something to be tampered with. It was one of the Empire’s proudest boasts that it never tried to enforce its beliefs and systems in any of the territories that it traded in or found itself settling or administering; only where economic recalcitrance, political instability or insurgency threatened the well-being of country or native people would the Imperial army or navy be forced to take action. As soon as order and stability was restored the Imperial forces would withdraw to their barracks or off-shore moorings, and the peacetime administration would be returned to the appropriate local authorities (or their Imperial representatives/proxies, where appropriate). The Empire was a fundamentally peaceful and beneficent force for civilisation and [??].

(c. 990 words)

Sunday 20th: Mathilde, Monday, School Trip

The two big cups of unaccustomedly-strong coffee are making her even more anxious and sweaty than she would usually be before a trial like today’s trip: the edge of anxiety magnifies and focuses her self-doubts; she’s convinced that she must have put on weight over the last week, because her waistband feels tighter than it should – concomitantly, her backside must be projecting, spoiling the line of her long coat and drawing attention to her weight gain; she tries to keep her chin tilted upwards so that the loose flesh she imagines flapping around her jowls like turkey wattles won’t be too obvious to the casual observer; she can feel cold droplets of sweat forming in the warm caves of her armpits, sliding down the already moistened and stuck-together curls of underarm hair, and then dropping onto the odour-sensitive material of her clothing or onto the warm, powdered swell of her fleshy rib cage.

As her awareness of her anxiety and sweating grows, so does her fixation on it, and her ability to ignore it. It sits at the front of her consciousness until she finds herself swearing at it, repeatedly telling it to ‘fuck off’. It taunts her back by sneering, and then giving another quarter turn to the sweaty anxiety trap. Mathilde, self-aware enough to know what she’s doing to herself, doesn’t find this circular self-torture amusing: rather, it’s an indictment of her weakness and uselessness, of her inability to master herself, to be the mature and responsible woman that she should be at her age. How can she expect to carry off the responsibilities of guiding/leading a school trip when she doesn’t even have enough self-control to restrain her feverish imaginings?

She can feel her breathing changing, getting faster and shallower, so she stops walking for a moment and tries to fix her attention on something that will take her outside of herself, which will separate her from the swirling mess of uncontrolled interiority. She’s at the end of one of the main bridges across the river. She leans against the waist-high stone balustrade and closes her eyes, trying to concentrate on the things that aren’t inside her head: the warmth of the risen sun on the taut curves of her cheeks; the play of the cooler breeze alternating on her skin; the rumble of traffic vibrating through the deck of the bridge and up through the pavement and her autumn boots.

Stop. Stop. Stop. Breathe slow and deep. Put your hands flat on the top of the wall. Concentrate on that cool stone and the feeling of the air coming in and out. It will soon be over, and you can relax and sleep.

These feelings of panic and inadequacy are familiar to her. All her adult life she has felt like this, on and off: that sense that she doesn’t feel how she should feel, that she’s different from other adults – weaker, more childish, less reliable, incapable of nuanced adult behaviour. It’s as if she’s got something missing from her brain, the piece that lets you enter fully into the world, unafraid, and which allows you to bridge the gap between yourself and other people; the magical element that allows you to love and makes you lovable. [To explore here – At bottom, she knows that there’s something wrong with her, something lacking, which stops her from really giving her heart away to another person, and stops her seeing the signs that indicate that someone else might want her to do so.]

So often in the past, before new experiences or frightening events – parties, social engagements, job interviews – she has found herself in a fluxy state of anxiety, sweating, and repeated visits to the lavatory, winding herself into an ever-tighter spiral of [tension]; in this state, she often spawns a little fantasy of liberation or escape, where some convenient deus ex machina frees her from her obligation/duty and leaves her [free] to do whatever she wants to do: these liberations, when they come in actuality, are usually of her own making – the feigned illness, the invented car trouble – and they usually result in a couple of hours of euphoria [eg…] followed by a residue of guilt and self-disgust that she’ll usually seek to obliterate with drink or food.

Afterwards, when the hangover is fading, or the food is sitting heavily in her digestive tract, she’ll pledge to herself that this is the last time that this is going to happen. From now on, things will be different – she’s going to get a grip on herself, and make some changes to her life that will bring her into a new era of maturity, personal security and self-regard. These plans usually revolve – distantly and vaguely – around personal grooming, nutrition, disciplined daily schedules, and commitments to daunting reading lists/exercise regimes. She’ll say “Right, that’s it! a lot.

When she’s in the midst of these resolution-making frenzies, she’ll often find herself realising that she seems to have been sleepwalking through her life for months: she’ll realise that she’s barely smelled a smell, or seen a colour properly, or noticed anything visually, or registered anything new in her world for weeks or months upon end. This will terrify her momentarily: she’ll feel as if she might as well have been dead for that period of time. These bouts of anhedonia just creep up on her, she knows, but she’s never aware of them until it’s too late: it’s only ever in retrospect that she can see how the colour, flavour, spice and energy has leeched out of her existence until it feels as if there’s nothing left that isn’t grey, irritating and inert.

[also…the things that bring her back to herself; and the sense of your life being ‘over’ in some way – when you get yourself cul-de-sac’d, and then realise that you’re going nowhere, and that what’s keeping you in that dead-end is, partly, the sense of hopelessness and inertia born of having nowhere to go, and no novelty in your world…and how playing things safe and hiding away from the things that could hurt you locks you into another iteration of that self-perpetuating cycle…]

Sometimes it will be a piece of art that jolts her out of this shadow world and back into the concrete, three-dimensional world of the senses, and into a world where her life is not over – a world where she can recapture a sense of enjoyment of the world, and realise that there are still new things she can do, new directions she can set out in. A world where she hasn’t already done all her best work, and where she can still offer things. A world where she isn’t washed out and knackered, on the back foot, and where she is awake to positive possibilities, and not just to fear, negativity, and the resignation to necessity. Where she still has the energy and courage to take risks, and the confidence in her own abilities to do the things that she’s good at, and which might – just might make her happy and fulfilled.

[Oh yes…sometimes it’s a piece of art…] There are particular books, the thought of which alone can take her to the brink of this more positive world […]; and there are particular poets whose rhythms and cadences can open up a little sunlit space in her mind, where a spark of indeterminate possibility is kindled, a space where you get an echo of that feeling you had at the start of the long school summer holiday when you were a teenager – the feeling that you had boundless energy, and that there were no constraints on you; that you could do anything you wanted to do, and that all you had to do was wait until the time was right and turn your attention to that thing; that you could live a number of different lives; that time is not short, and that the whole world is lying out there, waiting for you to discover it in your own time.

[More often, though, it’s a piece of music [or music and an image, like in The Rock and Roll Years] that will drag her involuntarily into a world of vividly-evoked memory and present emotion, making her shoulders and nape of her neck tingle with a melancholy anticipation of loss/that plangent feeling of nostalgia – that all the world of your childhood and its perfect, worry-free sunlit summers has been irretrievably lost [except, ironically, via the dream-like clarity and conviction of involuntarily memory – the kind whose vividness and immediacy can make you start with surprise, and which can make those amazed tears of recognition and loss creep into your eyes.]]

She opens her eyes, and there’s the river glittering in the multifaceted sunlight, and the glinting glass and cool shadows of the big-money corporate riverfront headquarters, and the paint and metal trim of the boats glinting in the sun, and the slosh and smell of the river scum and pollution around the bridge’s piers, and the iridescent sheen of oil on the water.

And here she is, on this anxiety-fuelled Monday, and now nothing is going to save her from the duty she has to do [leading the school trip] – she looks at her watch, and there are only another five minutes until the rendezvous with the other teachers and the kids. Choiceless, she has to resign herself to the task, and, freed from the possibility of reprieve, she does so with shocking ease: shocking to her, in the sense that she can create so much anxiety and unhappiness for herself in imagining the things that can go wrong, and generate so much self-disgust and self-loathing, that the rapidity of the transition to resignation makes her think that all of that angst and internal wrestling was a waste, waste, waste of energy, and that she can’t really have felt those anxieties in any real depth, and that she is just wallowing in the luxuries of self-indulgence, of narcissistic martyrdom, of habit-based empty solipsism. For a moment, she sickens and amazes herself…and then she flips over into finding it funny – especially how she can move so rapidly between these different mood states – that feeling of being out of control, roller-coastering on emotional waves that she can never control, but which – sometimes – she can manage to see coming, and which she can catch and surf on [until the metaphor drowns itself in a weary ocean of over inflation…].

Just. Stop. Fucking. Thinking. Just be. Just do.

So she strides off to meet the other teachers, her hand in her overcoat pocket, clamped on the fat wad of notes she’d made during and after yesterday’s reconnaissance trip with [uncle x].

There aren’t as many children as she’d envisaged in her ‘worst case’ imaginings – this is a positive start for her, as it means that she feels some of the pressure to perform (and to be perfect) diffuse. The other three teachers involved in the trip all seem genuinely glad to see her, and they all drop into a friendly, relaxed banter. It feels like it might actually be all right.

She watches the other teachers usher the kids down the river stairs, then across the slippery dark stone [jetty] and onto the slowly undulating deck of the converted barge they’ll be travelling on. The barge’s cargo hold has been converted to seating, and there’s a lightweight glass roof supported on narrow pillars; the sides of the seating area are open to the air, and there’s a little raised booth at the prow of the barge, equipped with a microphone and surrounded by plexiglass screens to keep off the spray and rain – this is where Mathilde will stand and make her commentary for the children as the barge steers its route through the city’s waterways.

The kids are chattery and hyper as the barge pulls away from the mooring, but Mathilde knows that this frothy haze of breakfast cereal and orange juice energy will soon burn off, and they’ll settle down into relatively docile and well-behaved attentiveness: there’s something innately awe-inducing about being so low down in the water, and in sensing the cold, deep water thrumming only inches below your feet, and in seeing the might and detail of the city from this low, unaccustomed angle. She feels those things herself, and she knows that each child will also bring with them a wealth of imagination, expectation and interests, and that today’s sights will impress themselves on their minds. She envies their impressionableness and openness to new things.

(c. 2090 words)

Friday 18th: Mathilde

The flats were a constant image through her childhood: from the imaginary interiors she constructed based on zero actual knowledge, through the looming presence on gloomy mornings as she walked to her junior school, to the time when, as a teenager, she actually gained entry to the building – first as the playmate of a new friend at senior school and, latterly, as part (the major part) of her evening newspaper delivery round.

The corridors of the flats did have a distinctive smell, it turned out, but not the kind that she’d imagined. Instead of an exotic mix of food smells and incense, the atmosphere was actually laced with the smell of disinfectant and sour milk, which combined with the bright strip lighting to create a rich, sickly feel to the corridors. She was always glad to leave the flats and have that sickly odour replaced by the good clean smell of car exhaust fumes smoke from the rubbish that someone was burning on the waste ground.

The ‘foreigners’ motif hung around until this time, too. Her [uncle] sometimes reminds her, when she’s railing against bigotry or racism, that she once came home after her paper round and railed – with equal vehemence – against the dark-skinned denizens of the flats, complaining that “They get all the best flats without having to wait, and they’re all drinking the gold-top milk. They ought to brick the place up.” It troubles her to be reminded of this, and to know that she could so easily repeat words that represented positions that she hadn’t adopted in any considered or reasoned way, but which she had copied from people who were older, or who seemed more worldly, or whom she found attractive. Hanging around the playground at school with her friends, in vague proximity to the cool boys that all the girls wanted to be with, it was easy to pick up these kind of outlooks: the boys seemed to throw these overloud loops of words out of their testosterone-ridden circle like lassos, hoping to pull in the close attention of one of the girls so that they could engage with her for a while and then humiliate her with their crass, guffawing dismissals. Mathilde would stay on the fringes of the groups of girls, furthest away from the boys. The tomboyishness of her younger childhood had vaporised after puberty, and she liked the comfort of distance, with the buffer of braver, cruder girls between her and the boys.

This pseudo-gang phase didn’t last long: it quickly became clear to her that she didn’t belong with the girls who swiftly moved from sparring with the boys to actual snogging and cigarette-smoking, and neither did she fit in with the ‘girly’ girls who were more interested in keeping within their own circle and comparing infinitely detailed notes about their moods, fashions and passions. She liked school, she liked her lessons – especially her history and language classes – and she was quiet and undemonstrative, not comfortable with emotional expression or exposure. She liked to hide away in the cloakroom’s shadows, tucked in between the damp coats, whenever people started discussing who they had kissed, how they kissed, and how it made them feel. It was all too embarrassing – not just because she hadn’t yet made that journey of discovery (though that was a big part of it), but because she couldn’t bear to see other people exposing themselves to potential ridicule and vulnerability: she knew how easily you could be exposed and hurt, and seeing people reveal their weaknesses and points of sensitivity was like watching a small faun walking up the ramp into an abattoir.

[…]

She can remember two distinctive moments when her thinking about skin colour and race underwent radical transformation [it’s interesting that, for me, this didn’t happen as a purely ‘abstract’ thing – that is, I didn’t suddenly realise that ‘it’s bad to be racist’ – it came from having two epiphanies, each one about a particular ethnic group – so, ironically, the general abstract truth about the moral bankruptcy and repulsiveness of the racist position was based on judgements made within what were essentially racist categories]. The first small epiphany came when she watched a television programme [‘Roots’ analogue] that dramatised the history of a [Slavic] family [echo in her school trip material – the slave market etc] whose generations of members had lived through the whole of the European slave era, the progenitor arriving from the East in the 18th century on one of the Baltic trade ships and sold into servitude in the Central Market Square, in the shadow of the cathedral that’s still standing there. The television series, told from the point of view of the slave family, provided her with the profound insight that this racial group [the Slavs] were distinct, unique individuals [just like the ‘Caucasians’], and that they had their own generational/individualistic/personality-base characteristics and desires. That they were all different – “just like us”. It’s a little hazy in her memory exactly why this seemingly obvious insight came to her at this particular juncture (although she does vaguely recall a scene where a slave, a would-be absconder recaptured by his owner, had one of his feet removed with an axe as a punishment and a deterrent to further escape attempts (she remembers a sudden, shocking gush of shock and outrage at this, rooted in the narrative that she had already shared with this person, who had become an individual to her [OK, she DOES actually remember, doesn’t she?!] And she does remember how she phrased her post-epiphany pact with herself: “On Monday, when I catch the bus to school, I won’t look at the bus conductor and see just a [black] face [cf the stereotyping and demographic constraints of 60s/70s Britain]: I’ll see a person. I will smile at them so that they know that I can see that they are a human being, too. I’ll never think about Slavs as all the same again.” And she remembers her shame that she couldhave felt like that before, and her sense of stupidity, that she had somehow been cheated into thinking like that. […]

[Second analogous epiphany is the World at War ‘Genocide’ episode, and especially that terrible footage of the bodies being bulldozed (at Bergen-Belsen, I think). How that started me off down a reading road…and how I can divide my intellectual development into the time ‘before I knew about the Holocaust’ and the time ‘after I knew’…and how you sometimes wish you could ‘unknow’ something.]

(c.1090 words)

Thursday 17th: Mathilde

And yet there was something very attractive about this difference, and the exoticism, that drew her towards these classmates and made her want to find out little facts about them, little nuggets that she could stash in her memory, and bring out at home when the opportunity arose. Sometimes, when the grown ups were talking contemptuously or insultingly about ‘them’, she would toss in one of these bits of information in a faux-knowledgeable way – “Yeah, and they don’t even eat ham!” – as if this were insightful. But the grown ups never seemed to pick up on the hollowness of her observations, and smiled at her.

She’d never been in the block of flats, but she knew that ‘foreigners’ lived there. At first, she pictured them as like the Slavic enemies from the Eastern war, as these had been the dominant image of bad foreign people when she was growing up: in the war films, darker skinned men with black hair and moustaches were routinely offered up as shifty, duplicitous traitors and cowards, who would shoot you in the back at point-blank range or knife you with a cunningly hidden gimlet blade after pretending to surrender. In these contexts, it was quite understandable that the films’ allied troops treated all Slavic soldiers – and civilians – with suspicion, and were prepared to shoot them rather than take risks. In time, these machine-gunned bodies ceased to be people in the viewer’s mind: they were sacks of clothes, ciphers – personality-free representatives of an alien, enemy race.

And so Mathilde grew up thinking that the tower block was peopled with dark-skinned refugees from the eastern war, and she suspected that they had hidden weapons, and that their children harboured grudges against their victorious enemies. They had infiltrated the country on ostensibly peaceful missions (to work), but they held the potential to threaten the host nation. (The language of the films stuck with Mathilde, too: soldiers cursed their Eastern enemies as ‘maggots, scum, vermin’, and Mathilde associated those words with the gloomy flats and imagined corridors of the tower blocks. She imagined the smell of decay, and dog shit, and crawling things in the shadows, and the taint of germs and ‘lurgies’ that you could catch from the foreigners’ hair, breath, and handshakes.)

Gradually, under the influence of the real, ‘Asian’ foreigners she encountered at school, Mathilde began to re-imagine the denizens of the tower block. Before she knew them as Asians, or Indians, or Pakistanis, and before she ever understood the history of the Empire or of migration or citizenship – long before that, she knew these brown-skinned people by the names she heard the older children and adults call them by: ‘wogs’, ‘ragheads’, ‘hudgy budgies’. These names had a real feel of humour to them, and to use them and laugh was a mark of fitting in with the other children, and of belonging to a more grown-up group; these names were a kind of passport to pseudo-adulthood, to a world where, by using the right language, you could be accepted into a group that you aspired to join. And so she and her school friends aped the older children’s language habitually, as they did when they discussed the disabled children (‘spas’, ‘flid’, ‘mong’) whose pictures they saw in the annual charity booklets that came round the school. None of the foreigners or children were individuals, of course: they were just instances of the abstract 'foreigner' or 'defective'.

In Mathilde’s mind, the corridors of the flats began to smell of spices and incense sticks, the walls began to be hung with bright cloths, and the doors had glittering curtains strung across them. Exotic food smells permeated the clothes of the people who lived there.

In class, she found herself sitting next to a skinny Indian girl with glossy brown eyes and a talent for maths, and Mathilde cultivated for a few weeks, until some of the older girls chanted ‘Paki-lover’ at her in the playground one windy, drizzly break time; for the rest of the afternoon, Mathilde worried that she had broken some rule, and that the girls would be waiting to beat her up after school. She approached the gate with trepidation after the last bell, but the gang of girls was already way off down the street. She didn’t forget the fear, though, or the sense of having done something that was unacceptable, and worthy of ridicule and contempt.

(c. 730 words)

Tuesday 15th: Mathilde – the café and the cops

Outside, to her relief, the van and the militia men have gone. She catches a glimpse of herself in the plate glass window as she passes it: her face looks surprisingly pale and frightened, framed by her pony-tailed light brown hair The two Muslim women across the street are describing what happened to a third who’s joined them: one points with the toe of her sandal to the splashes of Russian blood drying on the cool, shadowed pavement. Mathilde walks away, dreading the blue van and the militia men pulling up at her shoulder and asking her ‘what her problem is’.

When Mathilde was a girl, growing up in her parents’ rented Corporation house [on the estate in the suburbs], ‘foreigners’ were few and far between, although that ‘foreigners’ word seemed to appear frequently whenever grown-ups talked together – and especially after they had had a few drinks. As a snot-streaked, curly-haired blonde child, Mathilde had spent plenty of evenings sitting on uncomfortable chairs listening to smoke-smelling grown-ups discussing how everything was ‘worse’: how ‘they’ were ‘taking over all the jobs’ and ‘getting all the houses off the Corporation’. Every cigarette-smoking uncle or aunt seemed to have a sotto voce account of someone who had been ‘bumped’ out of a job by a dark-skinned foreigner who had undercut their wages. These conversations usually took place in wooden-floored church halls or community centres, at weddings or post-christening parties, when people’s heels squeaked across the crudely-waxed floors and ancient relatives lined the walls, cemented into plastic bucket seats while their grandchildren and nephews and nieces made dutiful forays to talk to them before disappearing to the minimally-stocked bar to replenish their Cinzanos or pints of bitter beer. Mathilde remembers the smells of those drinks on her parents’ mouths as they kissed her goodnight, and she recalls how romantic those smells seemed back then, and how loving and close her parents seemed on those (typically) summer evenings, when they’d all walked home hand in hand from wherever the big family party had taken place. In her room on those nights the hiss and hum of the party music would echo in her ears until sleep came.

From her bedroom window, in the mornings, she could see the big tower block emerge: in the winter, the lights from the flats would presage the dawn, and in the summer the big rectangular bulk of the concrete structure would hang there against the growing light, cool and shadowy, with the dawn light passing – clean and dazzling – through a couple of well-angled flats at the lower left corner. The flats, she knew, were where all the ‘foreigners’ lived: this was a ‘bad thing’ – she knew that too…although, if you asked her where that knowledge came from, she wouldn’t be able to tell you. It was just obvious and self-evident – undeniable, as everyone thought the same thing.

In her primary school, there had been a couple of children with brown skin. She remembers registering how they smelt of spices – their skin seemed to exude the fragrance of exotic foods that she and her family had never eaten – and how the boys had strange twists of cloth around the knots of hair tied on the top of their heads. She was both fascinated and repelled by these foreigners: their difference made them interesting and compelling, but she knew – somehow – that she had to keep them at a distance; that they were different from ‘her kind of people’, and that she must keep them at a distance. ‘Their type’ and ‘our type’ should not – could not – mix. Where on earth, and how on earth, did she ever learn that? […]
(c. 610 words)

Surprise

It's pleasant - but uncomfortable - to be so surprised on a Sunday afternoon: full of roast chicken, parsnips and Chablis, you settle down in front of the telly, intent on a half hour of aimless channel-hopping and tut-tutting, and instead find yourself surprisingly moved by a programme that you never actually watch, of course, but which you somehow know the plot and main characters of nevertheless. I speak, of course, of EastEnders, and of the Nana Moon historical flashback sequence. I don't know how often they do this kind of thing on 'Enders (I've certainly never seen it before) but I thought it worked really well; I must confess that every time Nana Moon opens her mouth I can't help but think of her as Shirl's (??) mum in Citizen Smith, but this sequence transcended that connection. Likewise Shane Richie: he's indelibly Saturday Night Variety Show man and Soap powder advertiser, but he carried off the 'confused, unable to accept the death of his relative' part well. An additional factor here was the the appearance of an actor incredibly typecast (the "no no no no no" bloke from Vicar of Dibley) as a war veteran. And yet...it worked. I was moved. Great work, scriptwriters and actors - the way they made those words on a page come to life and touch me: I love it when that magic happens. Thank you.

Mechelen’s Diary: 1939.

September 21st: second week of recuperation and re-equipping – now based at P-v. How strange it is to be free from action and gunfire: as if the world is suddenly operating at a different speed and intensity. Suddenly we have realised all the faces that are now missing.

September 28th: Word has come that we will be redeploying soon. Some of the men think we deserve a longer rest, but I can’t wait to get back to the front. Whenever I read accounts of soldiers who said that war – combat – made them feel more ‘alive’, I always treated them with some scepticism, even after I had done my share of street fighting and learned what it feels like to hurt someone mortally, and to have your own life threatened. Now, though, I think I understand better: in those minutes on the battlefield, when your life is millimetres or seconds away from death at any moment, everything becomes very simple, and time seems to move so slowly that you can see every clod of flying dirt, every whiff of smoke, every shard of splintered timber. It seems like you are in a different kind of time, a state where everything flows together and you are supremely, unconsciously competent – your body moves almost without command. By contrast, life at the barracks seems terribly slow and trivial […expand, more conviction… “Jarhead” ?…].

We’re wasting our time here. We should be doing something to help.

September 30th: Colonel J. made a speech in the mess last night about the need for patience and forbearance while we regain our strength and organisation. Our brother soldiers are fighting victoriously, and we will rejoin them soon. Our service and sacrifices in the noblest of causes. All have given willingly of their courage, strength, and lives. Noble deaths that won’t be forgotten. We drank to our fallen comrades.

I’m afraid that I later became drunk and involved in a near fist fight with B, who I have always disliked – the feeling is a mutual one. Not very edifying behaviour for two brother officers – so much for nobility and solidarity. We shook hands this morning in Col. J’s office. B. will pay to have my uniform cleaned. It is all agreed and settled.

Monday - Mathilde at the café

An unmarked dark blue van with blacked out windows pulls up, partly obscuring the clothes shop and the people opposite. The Russian stands still and becomes quiet as three militia men in their khaki-green uniforms climb quickly out of the van’s side door and move around to the front of the van. Each militia man carries a machine pistol in a bulky holster, and has a side-handled baton held casually ready in their hand. The steel-grey of their guns had a sheen in the bright morning light, and Mathilde feels that familiar sense of bafflement and unreality, the chilling realisation that they have death hanging at their sides, right here in this street, twenty yards away. She feels suddenly uncomfortable and afraid, whereas before she had merely been interested in what was happening across the street.

The three militia men are frog-marching the Russian around to the back of the van. The young man has been crying, Mathilde can tell: big splashes of drying tears have darkened his lapels, and there’s dirt smeared wetly across his cheeks. His hands are cuffed behind his back, and he has a broad red mark on his forehead. Ellipses of blood curve down from his nostrils, meeting under his chin. Mathilde feels her heart go out to the man – she thinks of the scourged Christ in the illustrated Bible of his childhood [come back to this later?]. It’s like looking at a fellow child being beaten up by bigger children in the school playground, and feeling too frightened to intervene.

The militia men open up the side-door of the van, and the dark-painted interior frames the Russian as he climbs precariously up on to the bare metal floor, hindered by the inflexibility of his manacled arms. As he balances on the top step, one of the militia men hefts his baton, swinging it round like a baseball player awaiting a pitch, and smashes the haft [??] of the baton into the prisoner’s lower back. Mathilde is electrified by the man’s screech, and slams her big cup down into the saucer in shock and anger; the last of her coffee slops out. One of the militia men reacts to the clattering crockery and turns to look, taking a pace forward into the road and staring straight at Mathilde. The baton hangs in the militia man’s left hand, swinging slightly, and the right hand rests on the butt of his machine pistol. Mathilde meets his eyes for a split-second, internally secure in her indignation, in the equalities of citizenship, and in the right of peaceful, rational protest: she sees naked power and confidence glaring back at her. The militia man’s eyebrows are blonde, shadowed slightly by the peak of his riot helmet, and his mouth is set, lips parted in a challenging smile. Before she’s even thought about it, Mathilde is on her feet and moving towards the cafe entrance, hand in her overcoat pocket, reaching for her loose change.

Inside the café, as she stands embarrassed and shaky in front of the till, she realises that the three men at the corner table are all staring at her [note their Eastern/’Slavic’ appearance at first mention…]. They seemed, when she caught their expressions just before they turned away from her glance, to be aghast. As she leaves, their eyes follow her, and when she tries to pull the door closed behind her, one of them comes over and holds on to the handle, leans his face in close to hers and says, breathlessly and insistently, [in Russian?] “This is the treatment we receive all the time. How can it be right? You don’t think it is right, either, do you?” [this is her cue to go into a mountain of anticipation about the possible implications of this and of her involvement - all those fears that sometimes run through your mind in certain situations, and which never come to anything like what you feared they would do…eg near road accidents, imagined confrontations after a bad-mouthed motorist does a u-turn and follows you to the next junction…].

c. 1050 words

Mechelen’s Diary: 1939.

July 15th: Still in barracks on the border at L-stadt (fifth week). Everyone is bored and restless, despite the discipline of endless drill and training. Somehow all that activity doesn’t alleviate people’s frustration at not seeing action. Today the senior officers have organised a football match for everyone to watch, to alleviate the boredom and frustration – officers against NCOs, which adds extra spice to the game. Not my thing, so I’ll be staying in barracks and catching up on some reading while it’s quiet.

July 17th: Weather unseasonably grey and wet – regular evening rainstorms at 1800 every day: the wind gets up, the temperature drops, and then the rain whips through for half an hour. Extraordinarily punctual and regular. I’ve never known anything like it at home. The football match was a farce, by all accounts – the pitch was a muddy quagmire, and some of the NCOs used the pretence of competition as a cover for assault on the officers – well, one of the officers (the one that you’d expect everyone to try and hurt, of course). The final score was 3 (NCOs) – 1 (Officers).

August 24th: We’ve moved at last: I travelled (as part of the advanced party) to the border town of H. The usual frustrating chaos at the station, with no-one expecting us, and not enough room for the baggage, which had to follow on the next train, and be collected by cart (when we’d already arrived and settled ourselves in at our billet). Something will have to be done: it’s the same amateurish members who keep letting the unit down. If it were a matter of life and death, something would be done, and people would have to face their responsibilities – but because it’s peace time, no-one forces the decisions. When war comes, things will have to be shaken up, or we will lose too many men because of ineptitude and indecision. Jesus!

The billet is surprisingly clean and well-equipped: the outside is unprepossessingly grimy and dark, but the inside is clean, well-lit and swept, and there were flowers placed in every room – a very pleasant surprise.

August 30th: 4 AM wake-up call. Address by Colonel F. in the town square at 0530. Hot pancakes, jam and cream for breakfast – beautiful. The usual pathetic, uninspiring delivery from F., but at least he made it clear that we’ll be starting to see action soon. The rest of the unit has arrived: much grumbling about inadequate provision of billets, bedding, and food. Colonel F. called an officers’ meeting to discuss the problems: he started off listening carefully, nodding and sympathising, but after 15 minutes of (well-founded) complaints, he lost his patience and temper (as usual) and berated everyone for complaining, insisting that we should all make the best of things as ‘There’s a war on’. No-one pointed out that there wasn’t yet a war. Ho hum.

September 6th: Three days in action. We haven’t stopped. Some of our unit killed, but the enemy is melting away. Incredible mixture of fear and exhilaration in combat – too much to write here, but I will come back to it when things are quieter. Amazing comradeship and stark choices. Too many impressions, and not enough time or words! (Enemy is weak, and their equipment inadequate – we are sweeping them aside with our modern weapons and superior tactics – hurrah!)

September 8th: Colonel F. badly injured (road traffic accident at temporary advanced headquarters) and evacuated to rear; J. has assumed command. That would have been my choice: this can only be good for the unit. Advance continues to make rapid, low-casualty progress. It can surely only be a matter of days now.

September 15th: pulled out of the line two days ago for recuperation and re-equipping. Unit is surprisingly depleted, but we performed exceptionally well. Have received plaudits from the high command (F. expected to receive posthumous medal – died at rear hospital). The enemy is suing for peace. Don’t expect that we will be redeployed until after the fighting is over (J. confirms). Earned our rest: everyone is incredibly tired.

(c. 670 words)

Saturday 12th November

Letter from [Mechelen] to Judith Mechelen (his sister), February 22, 1941:

My dear Judith,
Greetings from P! The snow is knee-deep, and it’s terrifically cold – colder even than the winters we used to spend in [F-burg] with grandmother and grandfather. The other evening, at dusk, when I walked through the town here to the officer’s mess, the ice was already forming under the yellow lamplight, and I thought of our childhood winters at F-burg. As I walked along, past the lit windows with their drawn curtains, I could hear the people talking within, and their knives and forks clinking and clattering. It was a heartening sound – it sounded like peace and victory, because the war is won in this part of the country. Then our bombers came over, wave upon wave of them – hundreds and hundreds of them, so that the whole of the moonless sky seemed to be filled with the beat and throb of their engines. And even the house windows shook with the sound of them. And if you had been here, you would have heard that sound as the sound of victory, as I did. For we cannot possibly lose.

But, Judith, that is not why I have written to you. I have written to ask you to forget the things I wrote in my previous letter. I was not myself. Please forget what I wrote. It was not correct for me to have written of such things to you. I wrote in a fever, after weeks of strain at the work we do here. I have rested, and I am more myself again.
But enough of such things – I will say no more of it. I trust to your discretion and your faith in our victory.
I will write again soon – please write to me with your news.

With much love,
Your affectionate brother, David.

Monday: Mathilde
Mathilde has been awake since 5 AM, nervous and anxious about the day trip with her class; she was in and out of the toilet incessantly before she left the house, even though she deliberately didn’t drink any tea or coffee after she got up at 5:30. She’d stood at the window in the pre-dawn dark, with the leaves of the trees shivering in the streetlamp light below her window. She’d stared out over the partly-stripped leave canopy, over the empty strips of grass in the bare front garden, over the chain-link fence and the vacant roadway. Then there was another row of houses – all dark – and then the constant amber glow of the city beyond. The first aircraft lights were blinking their way into [airport name]. She looked down at her watch and sighed – only four hours until the trip starts; she wishes it were longer; she wishes that she didn’t have to go at all. Perhaps she could call in sick and avoid the whole thing? She thinks about that for a while, drawn by the liberating idea of escape, but repelled by the idea of letting people down, and by the knowledge that they would judge her and find her wanting in her unprofessional, childish weakness. With one last twisting of her lips, she rejects the idea of cancellation and – having reconciled herself to the unpleasantness and stress to come – strides off towards the bathroom.

When she reached the city centre meeting point after her short bus journey, the idea of the kerbside tourist breakfast in the beautiful late-autumn sunlight proved irresistible. From the bus’s top-deck window she’d been dazzled by the white morning rays of the low sun, and had caught glimpses – down side streets – of rooftops receding in perspective, down towards the [river name], where the orange and grey roof tiles’ colours dimmed, fusing with the distant silver-grey haze over the river. In one momentary view, a column of gnats rose and fell in the light like the fine-sprayed waters of a fountain.

After she got off the bus, she walked along the broad boulevard, enjoying the unaccustomed sights, sounds and smells of the city centre. Where the buildings threw shadows the air was still cool, suffused with traffic-fumes and the cigarette smoke of pedestrians, but where the sunlight cut down the perpendicular chasms of streets, the cars glinted in the light, moving sporadically as the lights changed. No horns honked: the resignation of daily repetition ruled here.

At a pavement café she ordered milky French coffee and Danish pastries at the counter, indicating to the waiter that she would eat outside. Going to the door, feeling her confidence and enjoyment of the world momentarily renewed by the novelty of the morning, she smiled and nodded at three middle-aged men in business suits sitting at a corner table, but they ignored her, not even ceasing their conversation as they looked at him. Miserable sods.

Directly opposite the cafe, seen spasmodically between the moving traffic, was a women’s clothing store, and the bright primary colours and angular cuts of ‘this season’s look’ – apparently – were pleasing to the idle eye in the early morning sun. Less pleasing was the acrid whiff of the waiter’s aftershave when he leaned across to put the large (breakfast) cup and plate full of small pastries on the table. Christ, thought Mathilde, that stuff mustn’t half of stung when he put it on his face. She watched the waiter’s narrow hips and buttocks as he walked back inside: attractive enough in a whip-thin way, but there was something about his five o’clock shadow and over-elaborate sideburns that [repelled] her.

Resting her elbows on the slatted wooden table, she leans over the big cup and blows gently on the froth, enjoying the subtle smells of coffee and grated nutmeg. Sitting here, freed from her usual routine, she feels an incipient sense of focusedness creeping over her, a feeling that she recognises from thee fleeting visits its made to her before – rarely, though, rarely. It often comes over her in the autumn, for some reason, when the light is changing (the sun so much lower in the sky all day) and the year is draining away to the Christmas break; for some people, this is a dead, dreary time – going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark – but she sometimes feels contrarily engaged and interested in the world, for no reason that she can discern. She used to try and analyse what was happening to her mind at these times, but she found that the little sensations and pleasures vanished as soon as she turned her attention on them, too fragile to sustain her gaze. And so she just enjoys the feeling when it steals over her, and tries to let herself soak up as much sensory stimulation and joy as she can when her senses are all focused and precisely tuned to the detailed wavelengths of the world’s colours, textures, fragrances, planes and sounds.

She remembers drinking coffee like this at Uncle Jan and Aunt Mariette’s house, when she stayed with them in the school holidays: these visits were actually quiet rare, but she enjoyed them so much, and received so much stimulation and pleasure while she was there, that they have assumed a privileged and unrepresentative position in her memory pantheon; they are the unattainable, idealised golden age of her childhood. Aunt Mariette used to serve up her mild, milky coffee in ‘bone china’ cups with thin, hard, constricting handles that dug into Mathilde’s soft hands. (She was never sure what ‘bone china’ meant, but she knew that it was an expensive thing, something better than they would ever have at home, and she knew that she had to be careful with it – she could feel its fragility and brittleness when she lifted the full cup, feel the weight of it tugging at her tendons and muscles, and she could feel the weak junction of the handle and the [cup body] when she clinked it down gently into the saucer, hearing the echo in Aunt Mariette’s big, airy kitchen, where there was never anything out of place, and where the radio was never switched on; the clinking sound echoed in that fat silence, with Aunt Mariette gone off somewhere else, and Mathilde not sure what to do next; she always felt shy at Jan and Mariette’s, and didn’t feel that she had permission to move around the house freely – she always felt as if she had to ask permission to leave the room, and felt obliged to tell Mariette where she was going, and ask if that was all right.

Aunt Mariette usually served up a light and airy lemon sponge cake with Mathilde’s coffee, delicately iced, sprinkled with sugar, and drizzled with a lemony syrup; Mathilde remembers the way her sticky, sugary fingers clung to the side of the cup and made her feel that she was going to drag it accidentally and knock it over.

The traffic has cleared a little now: she looks at her watch, and realises that she’ll have to set out soon for the rendezvous with the other teachers and the pupils. (They’ll resent the fact that she’s meeting them in the city, rather than at the school, she knows that: but she also thinks that they owe her something – after all, they just shepherd the kids, whereas she does the research and planning, leads the expedition, and provides the commentary – she does all the real work: they should give her some credit for that, she thinks, but she suspects that they think she’s weak and precious, and that she over-dramatises her own needs and pressures. […]

Across the street, a policeman is talking to a youngish blonde man in a shiny, pale blue suit. The man produces his documents, and the policeman looks meaningfully over the man’s shoulder, down the street. Twenty seconds later a second policeman arrives, and the young man starts speaking louder, and gesticulating. The first policeman speaks into his lapel-mounted radio and moves away, smiling at two veiled [Muslim] women and sharing knowing looks as the women discuss the man in the blue suit. Mathilde’s language skills aren’t strong, but she thinks that the man in the blue suit is speaking an east European [language], littered with guttural (whats?) and Zs.

(c. 1700 words)

Saturday 12th November

Letter from [Mechelen] to Judith Mechelen (his sister), February 22, 1941:

My dear Judith,
Greetings from P! The snow is knee-deep, and it’s terrifically cold – colder even than the winters we used to spend in [F-burg] with grandmother and grandfather. The other evening, at dusk, when I walked through the town here to the officer’s mess, the ice was already forming under the yellow lamplight, and I thought of our childhood winters at F-burg. As I walked along, past the lit windows with their drawn curtains, I could hear the people talking within, and their knives and forks clinking and clattering. It was a heartening sound – it sounded like peace and victory, because the war is won in this part of the country. Then our bombers came over, wave upon wave of them – hundreds and hundreds of them, so that the whole of the moonless sky seemed to be filled with the beat and throb of their engines. And even the house windows shook with the sound of them. And if you had been here, you would have heard that sound as the sound of victory, as I did. For we cannot possibly lose.

But, Judith, that is not why I have written to you. I have written to ask you to forget the things I wrote in my previous letter. I was not myself. Please forget what I wrote. It was not correct for me to have written of such things to you. I wrote in a fever, after weeks of strain at the work we do here. I have rested, and I am more myself again.
But enough of such things – I will say no more of it. I trust to your discretion and your faith in our victory.
I will write again soon – please write to me with your news.

With much love,
Your affectionate brother, David.

Monday: Mathilde
Mathilde has been awake since 5 AM, nervous and anxious about the day trip with her class; she was in and out of the toilet incessantly before she left the house, even though she deliberately didn’t drink any tea or coffee after she got up at 5:30. She’d stood at the window in the pre-dawn dark, with the leaves of the trees shivering in the streetlamp light below her window. She’d stared out over the partly-stripped leave canopy, over the empty strips of grass in the bare front garden, over the chain-link fence and the vacant roadway. Then there was another row of houses – all dark – and then the constant amber glow of the city beyond. The first aircraft lights were blinking their way into [airport name]. She looked down at her watch and sighed – only four hours until the trip starts; she wishes it were longer; she wishes that she didn’t have to go at all. Perhaps she could call in sick and avoid the whole thing? She thinks about that for a while, drawn by the liberating idea of escape, but repelled by the idea of letting people down, and by the knowledge that they would judge her and find her wanting in her unprofessional, childish weakness. With one last twisting of her lips, she rejects the idea of cancellation and – having reconciled herself to the unpleasantness and stress to come – strides off towards the bathroom.

When she reached the city centre meeting point after her short bus journey, the idea of the kerbside tourist breakfast in the beautiful late-autumn sunlight proved irresistible. From the bus’s top-deck window she’d been dazzled by the white morning rays of the low sun, and had caught glimpses – down side streets – of rooftops receding in perspective, down towards the [river name], where the orange and grey roof tiles’ colours dimmed, fusing with the distant silver-grey haze over the river. In one momentary view, a column of gnats rose and fell in the light like the fine-sprayed waters of a fountain.

After she got off the bus, she walked along the broad boulevard, enjoying the unaccustomed sights, sounds and smells of the city centre. Where the buildings threw shadows the air was still cool, suffused with traffic-fumes and the cigarette smoke of pedestrians, but where the sunlight cut down the perpendicular chasms of streets, the cars glinted in the light, moving sporadically as the lights changed. No horns honked: the resignation of daily repetition ruled here.

At a pavement café she ordered milky French coffee and Danish pastries at the counter, indicating to the waiter that she would eat outside. Going to the door, feeling her confidence and enjoyment of the world momentarily renewed by the novelty of the morning, she smiled and nodded at three middle-aged men in business suits sitting at a corner table, but they ignored her, not even ceasing their conversation as they looked at him. Miserable sods.

Directly opposite the cafe, seen spasmodically between the moving traffic, was a women’s clothing store, and the bright primary colours and angular cuts of ‘this season’s look’ – apparently – were pleasing to the idle eye in the early morning sun. Less pleasing was the acrid whiff of the waiter’s aftershave when he leaned across to put the large (breakfast) cup and plate full of small pastries on the table. Christ, thought Mathilde, that stuff mustn’t half of stung when he put it on his face. She watched the waiter’s narrow hips and buttocks as he walked back inside: attractive enough in a whip-thin way, but there was something about his five o’clock shadow and over-elaborate sideburns that [repelled] her.

Resting her elbows on the slatted wooden table, she leans over the big cup and blows gently on the froth, enjoying the subtle smells of coffee and grated nutmeg. Sitting here, freed from her usual routine, she feels an incipient sense of focusedness creeping over her, a feeling that she recognises from thee fleeting visits its made to her before – rarely, though, rarely. It often comes over her in the autumn, for some reason, when the light is changing (the sun so much lower in the sky all day) and the year is draining away to the Christmas break; for some people, this is a dead, dreary time – going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark – but she sometimes feels contrarily engaged and interested in the world, for no reason that she can discern. She used to try and analyse what was happening to her mind at these times, but she found that the little sensations and pleasures vanished as soon as she turned her attention on them, too fragile to sustain her gaze. And so she just enjoys the feeling when it steals over her, and tries to let herself soak up as much sensory stimulation and joy as she can when her senses are all focused and precisely tuned to the detailed wavelengths of the world’s colours, textures, fragrances, planes and sounds.

She remembers drinking coffee like this at Uncle Jan and Aunt Mariette’s house, when she stayed with them in the school holidays: these visits were actually quiet rare, but she enjoyed them so much, and received so much stimulation and pleasure while she was there, that they have assumed a privileged and unrepresentative position in her memory pantheon; they are the unattainable, idealised golden age of her childhood. Aunt Mariette used to serve up her mild, milky coffee in ‘bone china’ cups with thin, hard, constricting handles that dug into Mathilde’s soft hands. (She was never sure what ‘bone china’ meant, but she knew that it was an expensive thing, something better than they would ever have at home, and she knew that she had to be careful with it – she could feel its fragility and brittleness when she lifted the full cup, feel the weight of it tugging at her tendons and muscles, and she could feel the weak junction of the handle and the [cup body] when she clinked it down gently into the saucer, hearing the echo in Aunt Mariette’s big, airy kitchen, where there was never anything out of place, and where the radio was never switched on; the clinking sound echoed in that fat silence, with Aunt Mariette gone off somewhere else, and Mathilde not sure what to do next; she always felt shy at Jan and Mariette’s, and didn’t feel that she had permission to move around the house freely – she always felt as if she had to ask permission to leave the room, and felt obliged to tell Mariette where she was going, and ask if that was all right.

Aunt Mariette usually served up a light and airy lemon sponge cake with Mathilde’s coffee, delicately iced, sprinkled with sugar, and drizzled with a lemony syrup; Mathilde remembers the way her sticky, sugary fingers clung to the side of the cup and made her feel that she was going to drag it accidentally and knock it over.

The traffic has cleared a little now: she looks at her watch, and realises that she’ll have to set out soon for the rendezvous with the other teachers and the pupils. (They’ll resent the fact that she’s meeting them in the city, rather than at the school, she knows that: but she also thinks that they owe her something – after all, they just shepherd the kids, whereas she does the research and planning, leads the expedition, and provides the commentary – she does all the real work: they should give her some credit for that, she thinks, but she suspects that they think she’s weak and precious, and that she over-dramatises her own needs and pressures. […]

Across the street, a policeman is talking to a youngish blonde man in a shiny, pale blue suit. The man produces his documents, and the policeman looks meaningfully over the man’s shoulder, down the street. Twenty seconds later a second policeman arrives, and the young man starts speaking louder, and gesticulating. The first policeman speaks into his lapel-mounted radio and moves away, smiling at two veiled [Muslim] women and sharing knowing looks as the women discuss the man in the blue suit. Mathilde’s language skills aren’t strong, but she thinks that the man in the blue suit is speaking an east European [language], littered with guttural (whats?) and Zs.

(c. 1700 words)