Castles and the land of the Pigs

My parents often argued over heritage. Not in a nasty vindictive fashion more in a jokey jesting way. For example, my mother came from a region in rural Northern Ireland called Ballymacaramery (which loosely translated means the land of the pigs). My mother’s family were all farmers with a few acres, some cows, pigs, a vegetable garden, chickens and a greenhouse of fragrant tomatoes whose familiar smell is a potent part of my childhood memories. They lived along a muddy country lane and the further you went down it the poorer the people you seemed to find.

The last tenant, Bessie, on the lane lived in a ramshackle caravan and had five children whose noses always ran and who often took to riding the backs of pigs. I was terrified of my grandfather’s pigs. They were huge dinosaur-like monsters who routinely killed their own offspring by squashing them.  Sometimes they would get free of the field and chase me down the lane. A trauma I have only excised after a 40-year period. Betty's children were fearless of the beasts and used to use them like miniature headstrong horses. Whenever Bessie stole vegetables or eggs or (more commonly) tomatoes from my grandparent’s farm she would hide them behind her back. I remember long conversations with my grandmother catching Bessie in the greenhouse, her hands full of tomatoes carefully concealed behind her. My grandmother would have long polite conversations about Bessie's well-being, her children, the weather. All the while, the thief stood answering reluctantly, head nodding guiltily while she spoke. My grandmother never called Bessie out on the goods she stole. I suspect anyone desperate enough to steal from poor crop farmers were more in need of sympathy than judgement.

Looking back, I can understand that, but in the colour blindness of childhood, I saw only black-and-white. I wanted to point out the stolen goods held hidden in the sweaty hands of the wrongdoer. In those days, children took direction from the adults around them and did not speak out of turn. I knew better than to point out the tomatoes and shame Bessie. I resented it but I followed my grandmother's lead. If she choose to deliberately overlook the theft, I was duty-bound to do the same despite my own misgivings.

Now, I can understand that, in those days of no Social Security, poverty was a life-and-death affair. If you had nothing the benevolence of a neighbour could keep the wolves from your door. All Betty's five sons grew up healthy, tall competent men. I'd like to think my grandparent’s tomatoes, vegetables and eggs played a small role.

So, when my father teased my mother he’d say, "You come from the land of the pigs, what more needs to be said!" To this day, when people tell me about their ancestry/landed/wealthy I retort by saying I come from a long line of poor pig farmers. It has come to be my totem and one to which I cling in the face of the elite.

I remember an ancestor of mine being horsewhipped for allowing a stag to get past him during a hunt. The landed gentry on their horses with hounds yelping excitedly had cornered a huge stag in a small lake. Locals were called in to guard one side of the lake while the hunters and hounds waited restlessly on the other. Three times the stag swam to and fro, from one side to another, terrified to leave the lake but unable to escape. My great-grandfather could feel the animal’s despair and exhaustion as it floundered briefly under the surface of the water. He ran from his post allowing the magnificent animal to escape the trap. One of the hunting party lashed him from the back of his horse with his whip for allowing the quarry to escape. I remember being outraged by the injustice when told the story, but my grandfather pointed out, “Many a one takes a whipping for what they feel is right!” So, when I think of my mum's family all these memories flood back. Of suffering and struggles mixed in with nobility and conviction.

This then was “The land of the pigs!”  My father would then grandly explain “My people came from a castle!" To which my mother would snort in amusement. Years later, my brother did some research and he found the aforementioned castle! He even travelled down and explored the ruins of this edifice.

By this stage, he had completed an extensive family tree and discovered the family connections leading back to Magheramena castle in Fermanagh.  These relatives dated from Walter Roe Johnstone (1679) (High Sheriff of County Fermanagh) to the more recent Captain James Johnston (born in 1880). This last owner of the castle, Captain James Johnston was killed in Gallipoli on the 9th of August in 1915 on the battlefields of World War I. It's strange to discover your family history the good, the bad, the poor and the rich.

It seems a universal truth that all of these material things pass into dust eventually. What remains are the deeds of heroism big and small that tell of all those who have passed before. If there is anything to learn from our past, it is that destiny lies in our own hands. We must grab the opportunity to do some good in this world before we too are effaced.

“Thou art even as a finely tempered sword concealed in the darkness of its sheath and its value hidden from the artificer’s knowledge. Wherefore come forth from the sheath of self and desire that thy worth may be made resplendent and manifest unto all the world.”

Bahá’u’lláh

Uniquely worried, snotty and wise

Children are so unique.  When you have more than a couple you begin to sense how much they can vary one from the other.  You’d think coming from the same family there would be much more similarity.  I was ever an inexperienced mother and so was continually aware of my deficiencies in all things to do with child rearing.  Learning on the job so to speak was a necessity for me.  

I still remember the look on the midwife's face at hospital when I rang the bell for her to put my first son back in the glass container in the corner of the room.  When she asked me why I didn’t do it myself, I told her I hadn’t learned how to walk carrying a new born baby yet.  I was deadly serious!  Perhaps I would knock his head off while crossing the room.  Their necks are not strong enough to support their heads, maybe he would slump and choke as I tried to carry him.  To say I had never held a baby in my entire life was not an exaggeration. It seemed ridiculous then to be expected, a day later, to take this tiny fragile baby home in such a state of dangerous ignorance. 

My inadequacies as a mother left me particularly vulnerable at the baby clinic which I would have to attend regularly.   Here they examined the baby and weighed them.  Since I was breast feeding in those days when bottle feeding was more common I would find myself in a queue with huge burly babies and mine was like an underweight chicken.  The midwife would look at my tiny baby and say, “Well, what is happening here, he’s not thriving is he?”  Then, she would weigh him and say how underweight he was and I would slink back home the incompetent mother.  My failings recorded in neat script on the baby weight record card each week.

By the time I had my second I was more confident.  Babies can survive incompetency, I told myself.  I was no longer thrown by the huge fat babies around me.  One mother had a thin baby like me and stood crying as the midwife lectured her on the importance of giving the baby enough milk to sustain him.  I, by now, was made of sterner stuff and stood stony faced as she lectured me too.  Am I bothered? Written across my face.  Then when she took his nappy off I was scolded because his poo was liquid in nature.  “Your baby has diarrhoea and this is serious, he needs special electrolytes to protect him from dehydration.”  Thankfully, by this stage I realised that all breast fed babies had constantly runny poo so was not alarmed by either his weight or the consistency of his nappy.  

With my third son at the baby clinic I was resigned to being lectured on runny poo and low weight and stood in line watching mothers reduced to tears by their fears.  It didn’t take much.  A comment as innocent as “She doesn’t grip my finger really well does she?” would have a new mother’s eyes watering in concern.  When you are feeling inadequate, any criticism is a bridge too far.  Mothers are ever prepared to feel responsible and/or guilty where their children are concerned.  I was then completely thrown when the midwife measured my third son’s head and showed me that he was off the chart in terms of head circumference.  Not sure what to make of this comment I asked what that meant.  She answered that his head was so large they suspected water on the brain and would be monitoring him carefully in the weeks ahead.  I wept all the way home and viewed my third son for months expecting his head to expand like an inflated balloon.  It didn’t and although finding hats to fit him was a challenge he thrived and was a normal child.  I wish someone had taken me aside and said worry less and love more.  But when you are parent, the truth is you are usually doing the best you can in the circumstances.  If you could do more you would.  Worrying is part of loving, I suspect.

There was one other difference with my third son when he was a toddler and I have no idea if it is linked to head size or not. When he sneezed he would blast with his mouth closed and huge snots would invariably stretch down like long mozzarella drips extending to his feet.  His brothers would lecture him “when you sneeze open your mouth!” This however was beyond him and we grew accustomed to his ‘nose to toes’ snot connection.  It became one of his party pieces for the family accompanied with cries of “That’s a thick, green one!”

Of course mucus/snot/catarrh is actually part of the body’s immune system’s response to infection.  Mucus moistens and cleanses the nasal passages, traps foreign particles and stops them filtering into the respiratory system.  As well as fighting infection it humidifies the air reaching our lungs.  The glands of your throat and nose produce between 1 and 2 litres of mucus a day!  An unsanitary reality. 

An early expert on sanitary conditions in London, a certain Sir John Simon, had fought to apply new theories of public health to cleaning up the foul smelling sewer that was London in the mid nineteenth century.  He also is reported to have written bittingly about one lady,

“Sandy Davis has balanced her post nasal condition with something like prefrontal lobotomy, so that when she is not a walking catarrh she is a blithering imbecile.”

Sir John Simon (English Physician 1816-1904)

However, since Sandy Davis, the actress mentioned was not born until 1937  (April 27, 1937 – March 2, 1992) Sir John Simon is unlikely to have actually been the source of this quote.  Sir John Simon’s name does however feature on the frieze of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in celebration of his many outstanding contributions to public health.

What is it about golden rooms that scream inadequacy?

A beautiful garden, a lovely blue-skied day to soak up the welcome winter sun rays. The Palazzo Parisio is a treat. The building is grand but the gardens are beautiful. I remember when visiting Versailles I was spectacularly unimpressed by the over-the-top furnishings. I mean one can have too much of gold, embossing, mirrors and intricate coving. 

It reaches joke-like proportions and you cease to be awed but feel a growing revulsion instead.  Wondering around the Palace of Versailles I did not envy royalty their silly gilded home.  Then, I entered the gardens around the palace and felt an unpleasant envy of the bloody rich.

Here in Naxhar on Malta, the  Palazzo Parisio has also pleasant rooms but a bit Louis the XVI, if you get my drift.  What is it about golden rooms that scream inadequacy? 

The Palazzo’s gardens outside are a wonderfulI place to have coffee and I sit on white garden chairs soaking up the smell of flowers and the sound of birds. 

There is only one other table occupied and I hear that peculiar braying voice of the wealthy, declaring they started their business years ago and have made so much money! They're sitting on the table next to me. How they have moved from Florianna to Naxhar to be closer to smart bars and better parking. Their gloating satisfaction sets my teeth on edge. What is it about ‘the rich’, ‘the would-be rich’ or ‘the has been rich’ that their exaltation in their material successes (real or imaginary) hits such a sour note with me? I must admit to it being nauseous to my system. A similar reaction to encountering a vomit smelling toilet onboard a rough cross-channel ferry. Don't get me wrong an aspirational attitude is admirable in so many ways, but a gloating self-satisfaction is never attractive. 

All of us vaguely know the humility that is truly appropriate when you examine yourself closely. You get a whiff of your own hypocrisy, your shells of pretence, the lies you tell yourself to cover over the cracks. In those moments of truth, we all shift in our seats in discomfort at the truth bubbling up from within. Instead of cackling over the misfortune of others like this lot. They are now discussing, their friend Lola’s disastrous boutique dress shop with inappropriate glee. They knew in advance it would end badly! Now, they speculate on another friend who has withdrawn from Facebook. “She was always a bit odd into nature and stuff! Must be something disastrous happening in her life?” 

I am asking myself, what no meaningless selfies of random spectacular venues, no gloating achievements/homes/cars etc what a loss! I sit here judging others so harshly when I am so rarely as vicious on myself. Perhaps this pernicious self-gratification habit sneaks into all our lives without us even noticing. Instead of examining our internal landscape we begin enjoying speculation on the ruins of others.  Just as I do now on my neighbours in this garden.

I will cease this attack on the rich around me and just enjoy the coffee, the sun's rays, the flowers and beckoning gardens instead. It's probably why being in nature is such therapy for the soul. You look at beauty and find nothing to criticise and just soak up its wholesomeness. Sigh with appreciation that it, like the sun beams on all with uniform abundance, impervious to all our inadequacies and shortcomings.

"Busy not thyself with this world, for with fire We test the gold, and with gold We test Our servants."

Bahá’u’lláh

I will rip his arm off and beat him to death with the bloodied stump

My mum has been visiting me in Malta and I have loved our long walks and chats. It is such a blessing having her here and at almost 85 she has indomitable energy. I have enjoyed her company immensely, except for her wiping the floor with me in the game, Rumicube. If you haven't played this game, do yourself a favour and your family,  buy one now. She particularly enjoys beating my husband, at this game, as he hates to lose and is always ridiculously upset when she has a victory. His rage brings a smile of sheer contentment to her face.

On one of our long walks, we were late getting back to the flat. It was getting dark and the road home was blocked with a crane and trucks so we took a narrow dark back alley instead. It was only when we were halfway up I became aware of the darkness, lack of lights and total isolation of the lane. Suddenly, out of the darkness, an African man appeared. He approached us in an oddly agitated manner.

I have to explain here that I did many years of karate at university in my youth and this created an illusion for my mother that I was invincible in hand-to-hand combat. When my cousin and I were teenagers we headed off with backpacks across Europe. She told me she never worried about us because of my karate! This was a total misconception. Years later on the Isle of Wight, in England, I joined a self-defence class which was full contact. This is taught me many things. 

That all those years of karate, where you just touch your sparring partner softly, are light years away from the reality of a hard punch or kick. It showed me that even a tiny man is usually much stronger than the largest woman. I bruise easily and so my weekly defence classes resulted in me looking like a particularly bad domestic abuse victim. Colleagues at work would not believe otherwise and one hissed venomously to me in the toilet to “leave the bastard!” Before washing her hands and exiting the room.

Ron, the instructor, was outrageously vicious. Demonstrating how most women, when strangled face-to-face with the perpetrator, would instinctively try and remove the hands clenched around their throats. Ron screamed in irritation. 

“He is cutting off your oxygen and you're scratching his hands uselessly! Begging him to let you go with your last breath.”

 He glared at the class and particularly at the woman members. 

“You still think you can win by appeasement! Well, you can't! By thinking like that you get too badly injured to do anything. Most men's instinct is to fight for their lives, women hope they can talk their way out!”

He then demonstrated that instead of flailing at the hands clenched around your neck, you should instantly jab two fingers as hard as possible into the assailant’s eyes. His two finger strike straight to the face of his opponent (stopping just centimetres from the eyeballs) had all of us women screwing up our faces in distress. At this, Ron launched into an excited rant, 

“You see, you’re all thinking, you couldn't do that to anyone. It's too vicious! But if your life depends on it, get vicious!  Get angry fast, it could save your life!”

“If you're in a dark lane and you hear footsteps from behind keep walking, keep close to the right wall. That way the attacker has to come to you from the left side. Now, you need to get angry fast. Imagine the bastard has murdered the person you love most in the world. Feel the adrenaline surges as your anger grows. Then, when he actually touches, you strike hard as if you want to kill them. Strike and run. Imagine you've only got one shot, so make it hard. They'll be expecting shock and fear from you, not rage and anger.

I practised imagining the assailant had just hurt my mum and when my sparring partner grabbed my left shoulder from behind I turned on him like a banshee (~wild Irish woman) cursing and punched him on the face with a roundhouse swing that felt like it came from all the hatred I could muster. Ron had been impressed, I had been shocked at myself and my sparring partner sported a huge mark on the left side of his face. I was also riddled with guilt. Obviously, my powers of imagination had been a little too excessive.

So here, 20 years later, I was in a dark lane with a potential assailant and my tiny sweet 84-year-old mother was at my side. Ron’s training flashed quickly into my mind. If he touches my mother I thought, I will rip his arm off and beat him to death with the bloodied stump. Adrenaline surged, I clenched my fist, prepared to bite his nose off. I was even prepared to do a bit of Ron’s eyeball poking!

Meanwhile, the African guy kept asking us to take a piece of pizza that he held in a box in front of him. My mother was calm but insisted that she already eaten didn't want anything but smiled her gratitude. I'm thinking my poor innocent mum has no idea of the danger she’s in. She's never been hit, never raised her hand to another human being. What sense can she make of all this? It's up to me to defend her, this is the moment Ron warned me about. To be ready, to be angry, the minute he touches her, he's a dead man!

Then tears started streaming down the guy’s face.  He says he's from the Sudan. His father died five years ago today.  He doesn't want to eat alone he wants to share his meal with us in memory of his father. We are standing in the dark lane and he's blocking our way offering a piece of pizza. I'm still thinking perhaps this is a ploy. Are there others waiting in the darkness to attack us. Friends of his? Blocking our way, he's probably keeping us here until they attack!

My mother moves in and hugs him in a wide embrace. I'm so expecting violence, I am completely thrown. She holds him close and suddenly I can see the genuine sadness and loss on his face. He wipes his tears with the back of his hand and my mother says he must come to our house and eat with us. She instructs me to give him my card so he knows where to go. I give him my card he shakes my hand politely and disappears into a nearby rusty metal doorway.

We walked the short journey home. My mother comments gently,

“What a nice lad that was! It is sad he's lost his father. It's difficult to be alone in this world far from loved ones.”

 I can say nothing I am exhausted by all the rage and adrenaline. Having too much imagination is a draining traumatic affliction.

Tolkien - life, myths, books, legends

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892 to 1973) was a professor and English writer best known for his fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion. He taught at Oxford university.  

He was actually born in South Africa and when a very small child was bitten by a very large Baboon spider in his garden. (Perhaps giving him the idea of that seen with Frodo and the spider!)

Baboon spider

At the age of three, he was on a visit to the UK with his mother when his father died in South Africa of rheumatic fever. This loss left the family without an income and so they moved to Birmingham in the UK where they would be close to his mother's parents. He had an aunt Jane who owned a farm called Bag End. (Could this be the inspiration for Bilbo's home?)

Bag End

The more one reads of his childhood and life the more it becomes clear how much he used all his experiences, including the spider, in his literary works.

His mother, Maple Tolkien, home tutored her 2 children and found that the young Tolkien showed a propensity for languages, such as Latin, at a very early age.  Unfortunately, Mabel died of diabetes when Tolkien was only 12. It would be another two decades before insulin, a treatment for diabetes, would be discovered. In Edgbaston, Tolkien lived close to Perrot’s Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks.  

Perrot's Folly

Towers must have had a big impression as they two seemed to crop up in his tales in slightly different forms.

Tolkien was also very interested in the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones. 

In his early teens, Tolkien invented, with his cousin, a complex language called Nevbash. The second constructed language he created was completely his own, Naffarin.  As well as making up new languages he took time to learn Esperanto. After university, he went with a party of 12 friends to Switzerland and hiked from Interlaken to Murren. 

He spoke of this grand adventure with much joy and the scenery would have been startlingly similar to that which would be experienced by Bilbo passing through the Misty mountains.  

Tolkien was in the British Army during World War I and served as a second lieutenant responsible for commanding enlisted men from the industrial heartland of Lancaster. As he later lamented,

"The most improper job of any man is bossing other men. Not one in 1 million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity”.

He was at the battle of the Somme in July 1916 and came down with trench fever from the ever-present lice in the trenches. Token’s battalion was almost completely wiped out in the brutal battles while he recovered in a hospital in England.  (Lice caused 15% of all sicknesses in the British army at that time). Many of his closest school friends died on those bloody muddy fields. In fact, he said by 1918 all but one of his closest friends were dead.

Token translated Beowulf in the 1920s and gave an acclaimed lecture entitled ‘Beowulf: The monsters and the critics’.  Tolkien insisted that this poem was not just

‘a mine of historical data into which some fantastical monsters have inconveniently strayed but a work of art in which the monsters are foils for an entire cultural attitude to life, death and courage’.

The ancient story begins and ends with a funeral and is an epic old English poem of 3182 lines. It is probably the oldest surviving poem in old English and one of its most important. A manuscript found of Beowulf has been dated between 975 to 1025 A.D. and is found in the Nowell Codex in the British library.  The oral tradition that this manuscript recorded dated from much earlier, and it is believed to have been composed between 700 and 750 A.D.  The poem mixes fiction with 5th- and 6th-century history.  The tale of monsters and battles has an epic timeless quality and would have been recited in huge halls for centuries.  Beowulf mentions characters like Ohthere (530 Ad) and his son (575 AD) and their graves have subsequently been discovered in Upplands, Sweden.

The mount at Lejre on the left has been excavated showing epic finds but the other mound on the right has not yet been examined. Who knows what more finds lie beneath?

In Denmark excavations at Lejre have revealed that a hall was built there in the mid-six century, exactly the time period of Beowulf (Beowulf mentions kings of the Skjöldung dynasty) and where Scandinavian tradition said it was. It is now thought that much of Beowulf is from real historical characters from six century Scandinavia. John Niles, a former university professor and an expert on the Lejre site, said that researchers in the area have found now evidence of a series of great halls dating between 550 and 1000 A.D.

Beowulf is written in a language that sounds very much like Tolkien’s Elvish tongue.  Tolkien would enter his lecture room, at Pembroke College in Oxford reciting Beowulf loudly in its original tongue with dramatic power and effectiveness. W H Auden once wrote to tell him “what an unforgettable experience it was for me as an undergraduate, hearing you recite Beowulf. The voice was the voice of Gandalf.”

Pembroke Hall, Oxford

Tolkien spoke many languages including Latin, French, German, Middle English, old English, Finish, Gothic, Greek, Italian, Old Norse, Spanish, Welsh and mediaeval Welsh.  No wonder when it came to making up new cultures and languages and traditions he found himself peculiarly equipped for this fictional landscape.  

Years later during the Third Reich, a German publisher wrote demanding to know if Tolkien was of Aryan extraction, in other words, non-Jewish in order to permit publication of his book in Germany.   Tolkien wrote a cold response correcting their misunderstanding of what Aryan actually meant.  Who better to clarify their erroneous perspectives than this gifted and creative professor.

“Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” 

For a long period, after writing some of his earlier books, he got tired of writing about Hobbits.  He felt had covered everything in The Silmarillion in enough detail, which had not met with public acclaim.  His publisher pushed for something more like the Hobbit again but Tolkien had lost interest in the topic.  Then decades later his son was sent to the front lines in the second world war and Tolkien began sending instalments to him, set in Middle Earth.  Tales of courage, heroism and danger, fear and suffering with long hard journeys that ended up in his famous book, The Lord of The Rings.  I like that Tolkien became more not less forgiving of others in his old age as this quote of his indicates.

“For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more--remembering my own sins and follies; and realise that men's hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.” 

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

In creating new races, legends, languages and history he never forgot to embed messages in his stories that are epic, timeless and touch the spirit.

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

"Song of Aragorn" from The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien