Month: March 2022

A Taste of Adventure

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

One of the very best things about my job is my role as the middle school Gifted and Talented Co-Ordinator. As one of the few not on the G&T list in my grammar school days you might jump to the conclusion that there’s a chip on my shoulder there, but that’s not quite right. A more likely excuse is that in my sixth form days I was involved with my school’s Arts and Humanities Society, a pre-university lecture/seminar group run by my history teachers, and it was so pivotal in my development as an academic that I have spent the last few years wanting to set up a society of my own here. The simple fact of the matter is that, four years into my teaching career, I’ve found the niche that allows me to do what I’ve always wanted to do: explore learning for its own sake.

So far, what that has entailed is two after school lectures, one every half term, on subjects that my students might otherwise not encounter in the classroom. I got the ball rolling last term with a talk on the Aztec, where we went on a whirlwind tour of the history of the Mexica, the geography of Mexico and the fierce deities of the Aztec pantheon – as well as the tale of Cortes, la Malinche and the fall of Tenochtitlan. Since I’d much rather the sessions were seminars rather than dialogues, I make a real point of taking questions and posing some of my own as I go so that these talks are more of a journey together than a lesson with me at the front. In the best of all possible worlds – the world I’m trying to create in a Monday afternoon classroom – I’d like to come out of the hour knowing that I haven’t added to their knowledge so much as given them new avenues to explore. That’s why I conclude each session by asking my students what they’d be interested in learning about next time. Today, there were a lot of requests for Chinese history: the Tang Dynasty, the Civil War and the Opium Wars. Perhaps that’s because we took a ride with Zheng He and his treasure fleet this afternoon.

Today’s talk was on Explorers, after one of my students requested a lecture on adventurers like Cook and Lewis & Clark. It was so much fun to research, not least of all because I have been lucky enough to do no small amount of exploring myself in my twenty-eight years on this Earth. I started off with the graphic below and, after we’d agreed Mr Young really doesn’t suit a beard, I picked my students’ brains about the locations in each one. Using the clues of this man’s local dress, and the mountain gorilla, and the facade of the rose city, and the scallop shell, they smashed every single one. Proud teacher moment.

I get a lot of satisfaction from seeing my kids go from strength to strength in the language classroom. But I’d call myself a seeker of knowledge for its own sake long before I call myself a linguist, and this is where somebody like me is in his element. Seeing the electric enthusiasm of my students sparkling like Saint Elmo’s fire from their outstretched fingers as they vie to share their collected wisdom with their peers, answering questions I haven’t yet posed four slides in advance because they read this book here or their parents showed them that thing there… There’s few things like it. It’s one of those “this is why I teach” moments, and the best thing about it is that you’re not having to do an awful lot of teaching. The knowledge is there. All you have to do is open a few doors.

This afternoon, over the space of an hour, we traveled the world. We sailed around China, Africa and the Indian ocean with Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and Zheng He. We crossed the Atlantic with Leif Eriksson and the Basques and wondered what took Christopher Columbus so long. We learned to navigate by the stars and explored the constellations. We met mild-mannered mountain men, meddling missionaries and bloodthirsty bandeirantes. We searched for Amelia Earhart’s final resting place, climbed the Matterhorn (and fell down the other side) and, saving the best until last, we sat down and had a difficult conversation with that most impressive of adventurers, and one of the greatest linguists (or even, in the opinion of this author, Britons) of all time: Sir Richard Francis Burton. Somehow I managed to cram it all into the space of an hour.

Well. Almost. We ran overtime by about five minutes, but not a single one of my kids reached for their phone, or started to pack up and leave. And that may well have to do with the fact that I chose to end the talk with the personal story of a friend of mine who gives us all a reason to believe in hope again: Luke Grenfell-Shaw, triathlete, fellow Arabist and CanLiver, and champion of the Bristol2Beijing tandem ride across the world. The best thing about that? Once again, I wasn’t even adding to their knowledge. Two of my students lit up at the image alone. They knew this man. They had heard of him.

I can’t tell his story. I won’t. Read about him for yourself – there are few men in this world like Luke. And though I poured my heart and soul into this evening’s talk, I’d like to think that it will be Luke’s story that my kids take home tonight. The world is vast, and explorers and adventurers have already been over so much of it and documented everything. But that doesn’t mean the age of adventure is over. People like Luke are living proof that adventure lies within, in our hearts and in what we choose to do with the world around us.

Godspeed, Luke. We’re rooting for you here.

https://www.bristol2beijing.org/

In the meantime, I’d better find myself an expert on Chinese history! BB x

Finding Doré

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Women’s eyes are always bright, whatever the colour.

HENRY RIDER HAGGARD, KING SOLOMON’S MINES

Sunday 27th March. Eight days until Italy, my first solo adventure in a long time. My desk is a little cluttered: a Marco Polo guidebook to Rome, a spare exam paper for Year 7 French, the Greenwich Maritime Museum’s Pirates: Fact & Fiction and various other odds and sundries. The pile of books I dip in and out of continues to grow. Previous girlfriends would have kept that habit in check, but in this bachelor’s pad, the library creeps through the house like an advancing army, billeting its troops on every flat surface in sight.

I don’t know what to expect from Italy. The last time I set off with a city break in mind I came home early. Barcelona was all a bit much, and I didn’t have much of a plan beyond seeing the old city. After three months of windowless boarding school life, however, I’m just looking for a change of scenery, really. Something to make my journal hum with anticipation (since this one is currently the least-travelled of the five, despite having the longest shelf life – thanks a lot, COVID). I’m hoping I’ll meet some interesting people who’ll give me stories to tell, and with whom I can share stories of my own, but the most likely outcome is a solid twenty-odd pages of sketches. And that’s no bad thing.

My primary inspiration in this field is the French illustrator Gustave Doré. You may have seen his works before, even if you don’t know the name: his was the creative genius behind the dark engravings that told the stories of Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno and Don Quixote, as well as various illustrations of the Bible. Some divine brilliance guided that man’s hand throughout his life. Half the hangings in my flat are prints of his, and all of them pillaged from desecrated copies of the most precious book in my library: an illustrated account of the Spanish adventures of Jean Charles Davillier.

It took me over a year to track down a copy of said book for myself. I’m not a collector of rare books, but I do take a small amount of pride in having a well-stocked Spanish library, and when I learned of the existence of this masterpiece, I knew I had to get my hands on one somehow – before they were all chopped up for their precious prints. Its rarity is evident in the ludicrous priced charged by some vendors on the internet: I’ve seen well-kept copies of the book go for as much as £1,350, with the most reasonable offers starting at around the £350 mark. So I could hardly believe my luck when I found an eBay vendor trying to get rid of theirs for £50. Collection only – as if that would prove an obstacle for such a prize. I’ll never forget the sheepish look on the trader’s face as she handed it over.

“Are you a collector, then? It was in a box in my dad’s garage along with all this other junk. Feel free to have a look. We’re converting the place and need to get rid of a lot of his old things. It’s funny, the day after you paid for it, I saw another copy going for several hundred. I guess I undervalued it.”

She did. Considerably. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to me, it’s more than just a rare book of Doré’s. It’s a window into another man’s head: another man who, like myself, came to Spain and was bewitched by its very own brand of black magic.

Of all Doré’s prints, I treasure his landscapes most of all, but it’s his portraits of the Spaniards themselves that I want to leave with you today – and particularly the fair Spanish ladies.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m as much a sucker for beauty as the next man, and when I’m sitting on the high street, or on the Tube, or scrolling through Pinterest, nine times out of ten it’s the girls who catch my eye and stir my pencil into action (Freud and a thousand schoolboys would have a field day with that sentence, I know). Double the prize if the sun is shining at the right angle, and Doré does this spectacularly – you can almost hear the midday heat in the image above with its shadows cast straight down by an unforgiving Castilian sun immediately overhead.

The grass is always greener on the other side, right? My grandfather found something that caught his eye in an English girl, a long time ago, but it’s his people who hold my eye. Not that I’ve ever held down a relationship with a Spaniard. It’s a hard thing to do when you live on this rainy rock, as Spaniards’ ties to their homeland are stronger than steel. I’ve met a few wanderers, but they are the exception to the rule. Cortes, the great conquistador of Cuba and Honduras and the Mexica Empire, came home to die. And when Spain is as beautiful a country as she is, who can blame them?

I’ll leave it to San Isidro of Sevilla to conclude with words more powerful than my own:

Of all the lands that extend from the west to India, thou are the fairest, o sacred Hispania, ever-fecund mother of princes and peoples, rightful queen of all the provinces, from whom west and east draw their light.

SAINT ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, DE LAUDE HISPANIAE

See you soon. BB x

Tears, Courage and Charisma

/ Benjamin Barnabas / 1 Comment

I hadn’t planned to write much this evening, what with reports to finish and the first round of the school debating competition to support, but as I let World Poetry Day pass me by without saying a word yesterday, I thought I might pay a short homage to some of my favourite poems and say why they’re so precious to me.

RITHA AL-ANDALUS

Ask Valencia what became of Murcia
And where is Jativa, or where is Jaen?
Where is Cordoba, the seat of great learning
And how many scholars of high repute remain there?
And where is Seville, the home of mirthful gatherings
On its great river, cooling and brimful with water?

These centres were the pillars of the country:
Can a building remain when the pillars are missing?
The white walls of ablution are weeping with sorrow
As a lover does when torn from his beloved;
They weep over the remains of dwellings devoid of Muslims,
Despoiled of Islam, now peopled by infidels!
Those mosques have now been changed into churches,
Where the bells are ringing and the crosses standing.

This misfortune has surpassed all that has preceded
And as long as time lasts, it can never be forgotten!

Lament for the Fall of Seville, Abu al-Baqaa al-Rundi (1267)

Al-Rundi’s lament for the fall of al-Andalus is poetry in action. It’s a desperate plea for help from the Muslims of al-Andalus to their coreligionists across the sea in the language in which they excelled. Regardless of where you stand on the debate over whether Islamic Spain really was a haven of tolerance in a darkening world, it is hard not to be moved by the words of its poets as the westernmost star of the Islamic world was dragged below the horizon, never to rise again. Perhaps it was that sense of impending doom, with the Christian wolves howling mightily at the door, that infuses the words of al-Rundi and Ibn Zaydun and their kin with such mournful magic, conjuring up an image not of what was lost that had once been great, but of what could have been in such a land. I could have chosen any one of a number of beautiful Hebrew poems to chime in more closely with my family’s experience, but al-Rundi says it so masterfully.

As a child growing up in a former Moorish stronghold in Andalusia, I was completely bewitched by the lost paradise of the Moors. I am under that spell still.

Of course, it sounds a lot better in Arabic – especially since Arabic poetry of the highest calibre is song in its purest form. You can have a listen here.

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling (1895)

I’ve always been a fan of Kipling. I guess you can chalk that up to a few years in a prep school when I was younger. Colonialism, privilege, blah blah blah. That doesn’t shake the fact he had a special gift for words. My relationship with this particular poem started on my first day as a deputy boarding master. My first housemaster kept a copy of this poem on his desk, propped up against the computer, and I made a point of reading it every time I should be in the office. It gave me strength in what was arguably a tough year – training as a teacher for the first time is tough enough without an earth-shattering global pandemic cutting right through the middle of it.

I really can’t think of a better poem for a housemaster. The virtues Kipling offers up (an edited selection above) are just as important today as they ever were, and if I should follow that path myself someday, I too will have a copy of this verse in my office. For myself, if not for my boys.

EL MOZO ARRIERO Y LOS SIETE BANDOLEROS

Camino de Naranjales
caminaba un arriero:
buen zapato, buena media,
buena bolsa de dinero.
Arreaba siete mulos,
ocho con el delantero;
nueve se podian contar,
con el de la silla y freno.
A la salida de un monte
siete pillos le salieron:
– Donde caminas, buen mozo,
el buen mozo arriero?
– Camino hacia la Mancha
a un encarguito que llevo.
– A la Mancha iremos todos
como buenos companeros.

Al revolver de una esquina
una taberna que vieron,
– Echa vino, montanes,
echa vino, tabernero,
que lo pagara el buen mozo,
el buen mozo arriero.
– Yo si lo pagare,
que tengo mucho dinero,
que tengo mas de doblones
que estrellitas tiene el cielo.
El primer vaso que echo
se le dieron al arriero.
– Eso no lo quiero yo,
que yo veneno no bebo.
Que lo beba el rey de Espana
que esta muy gordito y bueno.

Sacan los siete sus sables
saca el suyo el arriero.
De los siete mato a cinco
y los otros dos huyeron.
Viene la Guardia Civil
y se llevan al arriero
y el arriero tuvo tiempo
y a la reina escribio un priego.

Y la reina se reia
Cuando lo estaba leyendo
– Si como ha matado a cinco
hubiera matado ciento.
Y cinco reales son diario
mientras viva el arriero.

Camino a Naranjales, Spanish Folksong

Not all poems have to speak from the heart. I love a poem that tells a story. And I’ve loved this one since I first heard it years ago in the grating tenor voice of an extremeno shepherd, recorded for posterity in the archives of the town library. There’s a beguiling frivolity in a lot of Spanish verse that pairs jauntily with the mournful Andalusian elegies and love poems, but it’s the tales of the arrieros, the brave and hardy muleteers, that I’m especially drawn to. No art, no gravitas, just a wily muleteer who bests seven rogues and is rewarded for his courage by a queen, no less. Pure Spanish whimsy – and I adore it.

What are the poems that shaped your world? Do you have any favourite lines or stanzas? Do you sometimes try to weave them into your writing like I do? (You might have spotted a thinly-veiled reference to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes in Sunday’s post, which remains stamped across my heart – like most poems one studies for GCSE.)

I should read more poetry this year. I’ll start this weekend, while I’m on duty. It’s a lot easier to get through a poem a day than a chapter of a book, I find. Especially as a teacher. BB x

Seehund

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

2:45pm, 20th March. I’m sitting on a bench on Brighton’s Palace Pier, sheltering for a moment from the wind. A sign in front of me reads “It’s fun all year on Brighton Pier”. Somewhere down the coast to the east, there’s a few mad folk towelling off after a swim. The sea doesn’t exactly look inviting today. I look down through the slats. The bottle green waters of the Channel heave and swell about the centipede legs of the pier below. I wonder what creatures of the deep might be looking back up at me, besides the silent starfish in the silt.

Two men wander over to the parapet, gazing down at the beachgoers below. One of them watches in silence, nodding occasionally. His companion holds a recording device of some kind in his hand and is whistling a crude but not inaccurate imitation of the gulls. Is he trying to lure them in, perhaps? To what end? I can’t quite make out his game. He keeps it up the whole time, occasionally saying something in Arabic to his companion and chuckling, and then whistling his gull-call again. After a while, they move on, whistling. His friend must have the patience of a saint. You get all sorts in Brighton.

A few seconds later, a herring gull lands on the parapet. It’s not there for long, as a gang of girls in tracksuits race up the aisle towards the gloom of the arcade, screaming and swearing, sending the panicked bird into the air in their wake. Two scavengers in a truck trundle by in the opposite direction, trailing two heavy GLASS ONLY bins behind them. The planks tremble beneath my feet. I imagine, for a moment, the structure collapsing beneath its weight. In slow motion I see the bins rolling over backwards and a cascade of bottles plummeting into the sea below, some of them shattering on the struts of the pier before they hit the water. I have a pretty active imagination.

I move on up the pier, past the booming darkness of the arcade, which still seems to draw in a faithful clientele, despite the mobile lure of pocket entertainment. In fact, I’m actually pleasantly surprised by the absence of phones on the pier – for once, I’ve got mine out more than most as I take notes. Beyond the arcade, I reach a collection of outdoor game stands. Tin Can Alley with a bored-looking brunette in a red shirt waiting for custom. Dolphin Derby with an enthusiastic announcer who wouldn’t look out of place in a pinstripe waistcoat and boater a hundred years back. An Indian family points out across the water talking in a language that isn’t English. A couple walk past, hand in hand, one of them gamine with a grey-tinged ponytail over shaved sides and a nose ring, and her partner robust, black, ripped jeans and winged eyeliner, a rainbow lapel badge pinned to her sleeve. The air is thick with the pungent smells of Brighton: fish batter, candy floss and the distinctive damp tang of weed. The breeze coming in off the sea cancels out one of the three at a time, but not for long.

Behind the Tin Can Alley shack, a huddle of turnstones get some shut-eye. These often hyperactive creatures look out of place when static, and one wonders how they manage to get any rest at all with the thumping bass from the fairground rides at the end of the pier. It almost looks as though there’s a physical pecking order to the clan, and the ones at the bottom aren’t having much luck, hopping from strut to strut with remarkable dexterity. A passer-by sees what I’m looking at and stops to take a few photographs on her phone. The turnstones don’t seem to be fazed by me, or her, or any of this. After all, it’s fun all year on Brighton Pier. They’re probably used to it.

Nearer the fairground, an old gypsy-cart sits awkwardly beside the parapet, offering Tarot readings for a modest sum. Career, love, happiness and luck mingle strangely with Nestle, Astra Zeneca and Cornhill Insurance plc. I remember finding an abandoned gypsy-cart in the woods once when I was a child, its richly-painted woodwork fighting a losing battle with the forest’s silent army of moss, lichen and brambles. The gitanos in Tierra de Barros had no such fancies, eking out a living from beat-up cars and shabby tents. There is an old song of theirs I have consigned in part to memory, telling of their love for the Guadiana River, that came to mind:

The region of Chal was our dear native soil,
Where in fullness of pleasure we lived without toil,
Til dispersed through all lands ’twas our fortune to be,
Our steeds, Guadiana, must now drink of thee.

Gypsy ballad, translated by George Borrow (The Zincali, 1841)

I doubt the gitanos camped outside Villafranca de los Barros would know the song. It comes from an older world, much like the incongruous cart parked at the end of Palace Pier.

The fairground plies a busy trade for a chill-if-sunny Sunday in March. I feel like I’m walking through a childhood I haven’t known in twenty years, not since the distant summers in Dymchurch. Tea cups, log flumes and merry-go-rounds. A helter-skelter – see the Isle of Wight on a clear day! – painted up like a stick of Brighton Rock (or maybe the sticks are painted after the fashion of the fair). The static gilded horses on the merry-go-round look no less terrifying than they did when I was a boy. The ghost train reels in customers one at a time, lethargic, a chameleon in the cold. A father explains the “this high to ride” sign to his son, who is just a little too short for any of the attractions. I get the impression I’m snooping a little too much and wander away from the noise.

There’s a quiet spot behind one of the rides, looking out towards the mouldering wreck of the old pier. Seen from its sister with the city behind it, the Western Pier looks small and unimpressive. From the shore it looks a little more mysterious, where its mangled skeleton claws at the horizon like the blackened bones of a giant, mechanical whale, picked clean by the cormorants that sit on its ancient struts. In their oil-black funeral garb, they might as well be an extension of the wreckage. Brighton’s gargoyles.

Something bobs in the water closer to the Palace Pier, and without looking through any lens it looks too misshapen to be a buoy. It turns for a moment revealing long whiskers and those baleful black eyes, before sinking beneath the waves. I’ve been scanning the water all morning for that sight, and now I’ve found one, I can’t let the moment pass me by. I count the seconds. One, two, three…

Seals are such mesmerising creatures to watch. It could be their friendly faces, the way they seem genuinely curious about the world above the waves. For me, it’s all about their eyes. There are few creatures out there with eyes like a seal’s: enormous, black orbs that seem to see forever. You only see the whites of a seal’s eye when they’re really close, otherwise you might as well be looking into the dull glaze of a shard of volcanic glass. I used to watch them bobbing about in the waves from the white cliffs when I was a teenager, and once or twice I was lucky enough to see them closer still, lounging about on the mudflats of the Stour Estuary and snorting their indignation at the noisy ferry-boat off the Farne Islands.

Those were greys: hulking, dog-like beasts of considerable size, especially the bulls who came charging after the boat. It’s not hard to see why so many languages label the creatures sea-dogs, or sea-calfs, or even sea-cats. But unless you’re in the water with them, all you see is the inquisitive face, bobbing above the surface. The seal comes into its own beneath the waves. I should love to see one in its murky underwater kingdom one day.

Some creatures command the eye. The ghostly silence of the male hen harrier, or the aerial mastery of the kite. The sunken eyes of the fox and the stern gaze of the stag. I once sat in my bedroom poring over bird guides of Spain and the Mediterranean, bemoaning how drab our world was by comparison. With age comes understanding, I suppose. If the seal hadn’t drifted further and further out to sea, I could have watched for hours.

I spent most of my teenage years growing up on the pebbled shores of this same stretch of ocean. The salt breeze and yellow-grey skies of the Channel are written into my skin like age-lines. I should make a point of coming down to the coast more often in future, if not to blast the cobwebs of work aside with a healthy salt spray, then to find the writing material I’m always searching for. If I can find my way to a quieter spot than Brighton, I might even be able to sidestep the bookshops that always draw me in. Fortunately, I’ve been such a loyal customer to Waterstones over the last couple of months that I was able to walk away from today’s haul for a steal of a price. Just don’t ask how many books I bought – or how big the discount was. It’s all for a good cause. I’ll keep telling myself that. BB x

Death of a Bridge

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

There’s a great big mound of earth down in Downside Wood where the old bridge used to stand. The stream that once ran gaily beneath its mossy arches hiccups and lurches through two black plastic pipes, swallowed at one end of the slump and regurgitated out the other. The vegetation hangs back from the mire, keeping a cautious distance, thorns and nettles recoiling as though stung by the mud. Caesar’s legions made siege ramps that looked more sightly. At either end, where the track leads up and out of the forest, smoothed slabs of brickwork poke out of the mud like the bones of the bridge that was. The rest of the rubble lies buried deep beneath the mound, I suppose, making a barrow of the dell. Do bridges have ghosts? I suspect this one might.

I sat up in the branches of a tree during a break between lessons one summer, listening to M.M. Kaye’s Trade Wind and taking in the view of the bridge as for the last time. That was the year I saw the first signs of what was coming: a waterlogged sheet of A4 paper in a plastic wallet, fastened to the masonry by a tag, bearing the stamp of the local council. The word “SAFETY” written in bold black ink is all I can remember, smudged and blued at the corners by a couple of days of dew and rain. Safety… how satisfying it must sound to the inspector, and how terrifying to the stonework of the old buildings of the world. If stone could shake, it might do so at the word.

The world cried out in despair when Palmyra and the Buddhas of Bamiyan went up in smoke, reduced to dust by religious bigotry, but when I see the Great Slump in Downside Wood, I wonder how many other beautiful works of man and God disappeared under the councilor’s red pen without a word of protest.

As I looked down upon the devastation, a nightmare from my childhood came back to me: a scene from a film that haunted me so terribly that I remember every word, every brush-stroke, every note pulled from the strings of the violins. I’m talking, of course, about the nightmare fuel that is the 1978 Watership Down:

Holly: Our warren… destroyed… Men came… filled in the burrows… couldn’t get out… There was a strange sound… hissing… the air turned bad… runs blocked with dead bodies… Couldn’t get out…. Everything turned mad. Warren, earth, roots, grass… All pushed into the air.
Hazel: Men have always hated us.
Holly: No… they just destroyed the warren because we were in their way.
Fiver: They’ll never rest until they’ve spoiled the earth.

Richard Adams, Watership Down

I know so little of the bridge that once stood in Downside Wood. Was it only a fanciful exercise by a local mason for the lord of the manor, or did it have stories to tell? Did lovers sit upon its parapets before the ramblers and the cross country team tramped across its back? Did a poet or writer pause for thought over the archway and listen to the buzzards crying over the meadow beyond, before cigarettes were hastily stamped out into the mud as somebody saw Sir coming?

The bridge is gone. Safety and development swept it aside like so much that was beautiful. The old meadow behind St Aidan’s College, where I once saw a barn owl drifting in the evening air looking for voles, lies deep beneath a building site as the students choke the city. Like Richard Adams before me, I can only look on in dismay and add my voice to the thousands. There is a mystical beauty in the ruins of man’s work that is surely greater than any single life, if we can but look beyond our own existence for just a moment. These things around us, these rocks and trees, will be here long after we are gone, and will tell their own stories from generation to generation.

I hope that, one day, a generation will come along with mercy in its heart. It’s too late for the Downside Bridge, but not for a thousand other unsung relics scattered across this island. Not every fern is sacred, but in the grand scale of things, the world around us is worth more than a human accident. BB x

Rewind, Reset, Refocus

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Diary Entry: 14th March, 2012. Ten years ago today.

Heavens above, the first night of Fiddler is less than a day away! This year has flown by… Today went by in a similar blur: four frees (essentially), Spanish and English raced past with a quick thrashing of Peter at chess over lunch and a Yearbook planning session. The dress rehearsal was superb – a lot to be ameliorated for the night itself (apparently) but otherwise very good. I must say, personally, I’m impressed with everyone. Our Tevye in particular: he’s come a long way since only just deciding to put his oar in… One of the big five is almost out of the way! The only question is… what next?

When I was seventeen, lists to me were everything. I think it was a long hangover from the teenage bird-watching days: garden lists, patch lists, year lists and lifers. That kind of thing. I wasn’t really the kind of kid who had it all figured out from the beginning, but I did appreciate a tick list to motivate me. I must have the original “bucket list” of fifty miscellaneous tasks I wanted to achieve before the age of fifty stored away on a memory stick, buried deep beneath a hundred other forgotten half-finished jobs, books and games. The irony isn’t lost on me.

I still remember the big five, though. They were the “ultimate goals”, the quests that I had to complete, come Hell or high water. It went something like this:

  1. Play the part of Motel in Fiddler on the Roof
  2. Get a place at Durham University
  3. Travel from Cairo to Cape Town
  4. Get married
  5. Publish the book

You’ll notice that two of them are struck through. Completed. Dicho y hecho. You might well think it more than a little foolish that I managed to get two of my five “great quests” completed within six months of each other, and by the age of eighteen, to boot. You might also question the logic of making the First Quest so very specific, which relied upon a great many external factors, but as the descendant of a lost Jewish family driven into hiding, Fiddler on the Roof holds a very special place in my heart. I was also uncommonly blessed with a musical director for a mother, so I did, I admit, have a significant advantage in achieving one of them early on.

“Is there a blessing for a sewing machine?“

Durham? Durham wasn’t even up for debate. I simply had to get there. And though I do my very best to advise my own students against such stubborn folly, I was more than prepared to take a gap year and have a second shot when I didn’t get a place at the university of my dreams the first time around. Call it madness, but I wasn’t prepared to accept anywhere else. It was a gamble I ended up making good on, shored up by a much more favourable set of A Level grades. A combination of luck, hard work and stubborn pride secured me the Second Quest.

Of the remaining three, one was swapped out a few years back for a new quest:

3. Find the family

As I got older and my desire for reckless travel steadily fell away – the pressures of holding down a job and being in a relationship will do that to you, I guess – the idea of making the great overland trek from Cairo to Cape Town by any means at hand drifted further and further into the nether realms of lost dreams. Living in Uganda very much whetted my appetite for all things African, but in the years since I’ve been made to question that interest so often, through the lens of anti-colonialism, BLM and the downfall of my Gospel Choir. Eventually, the risks outweighed the allure. I buried that dream a long time ago, and replaced it with a much more personal Third Quest: finding the lost family I had never met.

I found them. That was five years ago – you can read the story here, if you missed it. Of all my quests, the search for my family has been the most precious, and I live in its afterglow twice a week every week as I guide my youngest cousin towards his English B1 exam.

That leaves only two of the original five: arguably, the two chambers of my heart. The book, and the one. I’m not afraid to admit that my single greatest ambition since childhood has been one and the same, and combines those two into one; and that is to read my own stories to my own children one day. It’s an image I’ve had in my head for almost twenty years: sitting on the edge of the bed, my life’s work in my hands, putting on all these silly voices and painting the world I’ve spent decades creating for my children. Leading them there, chapter by chapter. Watching them grow up with my heroes, until they find stories of their own and take up the mantle my great-grandparents passed on to me.

Of course, there’s a small but fundamental stepping stone that must be crossed first: the Fourth Quest.

Getting married and publishing the book. The two quests go hand in hand. That, perhaps, is why coming out of a long-term relationship has been a bit more jarring than I thought it would be. The derailing of two quests at once. A future rerouted, rewritten, a page of thoughts and ideas and names scrubbed blank. It’s not disheartening – nothing can be when the birds are singing and the year is on the turn – but it does leave you knocked out of orbit.

Ten years ago tonight, I was psyching myself up for the first night of Fiddler on the Roof. Tonight, Russian forces continue to cut a burning path through Ukraine. Kiev shelled. Mariupol in flames. Hospitals in ruins. As Motel, I took my young family and fled west into Europe. The radio today was talking about how the British government is offering a tax-free allowance of £350 per month to those willing to put up Ukraine’s refugees. According to the Beeb, some 43,000 have already signed up to help, only five hours in.

The events described in Fiddler took place in 1905. More than a hundred years later, the parallels seem alarming. They put one’s troubles in context. Personal quests and family pride must be denied and set aside and mortified and all that. Perhaps it’s high time I set myself a new quest. In the meantime, there is work, and work is good for the soul, even if marking GCSE translations is a far cry from any soul food I’ve ever eaten. BB x

Tevye: Work hard, Motel. Come to us soon.

Motel: I will, Reb Tevye. I’ll work hard.

Fiddler on the Roof, Act II, Scene 8

Half Time

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Saturday afternoon finds me out on the side lines, camera in hand, supporting the boys. We put up a valiant fight and place third, thanks to a surprise goal and some seriously impressive goalkeeping. The ball comes my way at some point and I aim to block it, but apparently the ball was way over there and my leg was somewhere else. One of the boys saw fit to rib me about it in house later. I can laugh it off now as I did then. Football has never been my forte, or any other sport for that matter.

Working in a boarding school has got me more invested in sports than I ever was at school. There’s something magnetic about watching your charges do themselves and their team proud, whether they win or lose, that I never really felt when I was obliged to play the game. It’s not that my parents didn’t try to get me into sports when I was younger – goodness knows they tried their best – it’s just that then, as ever, it wasn’t in my interest. Which is why I’m here, not far off the age of thirty, and I still couldn’t name you more than about ten footballers at best. Somewhere along the line it seemed a great deal more important to consign to memory the sight and sound of every single feathered animal in the UK. I guess my excuse for stretching myself thin with the things I do – making music, speaking five languages, writing books and knowing my way around the natural world – might be construed as compensating for the fact that I could never do the one thing that comes naturally to most boys… that is, kicking a ball.

I can’t really remember a great deal about my sports lessons at school. If the truth be told, I’m pretty sure I used what cunning I had back then to wangle my way out of sports for good by the time I was sixteen. I think it was along the lines of “rehearsals for a musical” that I managed to stretch over two years. At least in my first year at school I was given an excuse when an angry sixth former stoved in a few lockers, including mine, with my sports kit trapped blissfully inside. Two memories alone remain: being made to play on through a blizzard in woefully short football kit, and the humiliation of being made to keep attempting the high jump until I was finally able to clear it – by which point it was almost level with the mat. And while I’d normally pull a face at using the same verb twice in succession, “being made to…” sums up my sporting experience pretty well. Understandably, this air-headed naturalist wasn’t ever really at home on the sports pitch.

Which is why it’s all the more surprising to me that I get such a kick out of supporting my boys in their games at the weekend.

Because leopards never change their spots, I turned my camera skywards a couple of times on the buzzards that came drifting over the pitch, as I once did during the summer fixtures a decade ago. Spring is here and the birds are pairing off already. There’s a part of me that sighs, but a sunnier, more hopeful side that smiles, and I cross my fingers and I hope theirs is a successful pairing. Successful being the appropriate word, since happiness seems out of sorts. We still don’t know for sure whether birds feel emotions like we do, but I’d like to think they have something close to it. You see hints every so often that they might: a swallow mourning beside its partner’s tiny body, crows sliding down snow-bound rooves, choughs hurling themselves from great heights seemingly for the sheer thrill of it.

It’s uplifting seeing the smiles on my boys’ faces during a game, and I find myself wondering whether that’s the same electric feeling you get after a concert, or from sighting one of our island’s most beautiful creatures riding the spring thermals. And now the sun is out again, I might just go for another heart-healing walk in the Weald. The forest weaves a magic that never dies. BB x

Pygmalion

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Yesterday was International Women’s Day. If you hadn’t noticed, you probably have a much healthier relationship with your devices than I do. Being naturally cautious when it comes to writing about trending topics – and keeping a wary eye on the growing stack of marking on my desk – I wasn’t originally going to write anything on the matter. In previous years I might have jumped on the bandwagon and sang the praises of women from history who I find inspirational, but that muse didn’t find me today.

It only occurred to me after a couple of hours’ highly productive procrastination on the novel last night that there’s one woman who I’ve been writing about since I first got bit by the writing bug, now twenty years ago. A divisive woman who has been at times a distraction, at others a channel for my doubts, but always a polestar, burning bright, night after night, though the other stars around her blink in and out of the darkness.

This is Leonor. And this her story.

I’ll be twenty-eight this summer. For no less than twenty of those years, the red-haired princess has been living rent-free inside my head. Whether she was inspired by a childhood friend, the Little Mermaid or a double-page cartoon from an Art Attack! magazine, I don’t suppose I’ll ever be certain. Like as not, she sprung into being as a combination of the three. One thing I know for sure: of all the cast and characters of the books I’ve spent the greater part of my life writing, she’s been the one constant. The world has shifted beneath her feet several times, sometimes drastically, but she has weathered every storm, survived every crush unaltered and resisted every rewrite. When I brought the book over to Spain a few years ago, she was the final frontier, the last character to trade in her name for a nombre.

Leonor in her “Stephanie” days, back in ’04

Without giving too much away, I’ll introduce you. Leonor is one of the two central characters in the story, though arguably it’s her story that’s the one being told. The princess of Meridia, she’s playful, sharp-witted and short-tempered, with a sense of duty almost equal to her stubbornness and pride. Descended from two legendary heroes from our own timeline, she is catapulted into the role of Queen by a series of tragic events and, amid the fires of war and personal tragedy, she becomes one of the greatest rulers Meridia has ever known, captaining the sinking ship of her doomed kingdom to its final hour.

She’s an avatar of hope and a rallying flag in human form for her people. And yes, I’m sure I play into the “fiery impetuous redhead” stereotype more than once.

My little princess grew up so fast…! ’18

In the saga’s early days, when the concept was still very much a fantasy/sci-fi adventure, I had her imbued with magical powers. These days her greatest power is her charisma: in a saga filled with reluctant rulers, ambitious bureaucrats and silver-tongued servants, Leonor comes into her own as a woman who stands her ground in a man’s world: adored by her subjects, respected by her contemporaries and feared by her enemies. It’s no surprise that in recent years I’ve looked to two other fierce red-headed rulers to bolster her character: Boudicca of the Iceni and Elizabeth I of England.

Now here’s the question. Am I in love with my own creation?

Of course not. For one thing, I wouldn’t dream of playing the third wheel to my hero! But you’d be surprised how much of a flashpoint it’s been in the past. Two previous girlfriends have challenged me about my attachment to her. Try to put yourself in their shoes. I suppose it’s not all that different to inviting a partner over, only for them to discover objects left behind by a former lover. As I’ve tried to explain before, if you want to get jealous about one of my characters, you might as well take it out on the rest of the cast – I have no less love for my other creations.

And yet the fact remains that, by the age of twenty-eight, I’ve had a longer and arguably closer relationship with my central characters – Leonor included – than I have with anybody I know, outside of my family. I wonder whether that’s why I’ve always been so comfortable with my own company. It’s easy to handle solitude when you’re never really on your own.

She’s not my idealised woman by any stretch of the imagination, though it’s possibly due to my long connection to her that I’ve always had a weakness for dark eyes and red hair. She’s no imaginary friend, anymore than Desalma is a shadow that haunts my dreams. I neither love the women I conjure out of the air, nor do I fear the monsters I create. She is a figment of my imagination, and though she’s found her way into journals, homework diaries, used envelopes and maths book margins over the years, if I were to disappear one day, so would she. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never stopped trying to tell her story.

Do you know what I’d like? If I should be lucky enough to have a daughter of my own one day, I’d love to tell them her story. To bring them up to tales of her courage, her unflinching hope in the face of overwhelming odds. To show them that, though she wasn’t perfect, though her pride got her into trouble, she kept on fighting for what she believed in.

She’s not my Galatea, but she is my muse, my inspiration, and her story needs to be told. That’s why I write. That’s why I’ve always written. After all, it’s hard to say no to a princess. BB x

For the Sport of Your Own Crows

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

My phone is telling me I walked some twenty-five kilometres today. After trekking to Three Bridges Station there and back on foot, various perambulations through Reading and London and walking the Combe Gibbet Circular, I can’t say I’m surprised. What I can say is that I bloody well ought to learn to drive, because it’s frankly ridiculous how much of the world I could be exploring at weekends which is just too far away to reach on foot. Dammit.

Fortune favours the bold, which is another way of saying if you want to get lucky, you have to make your own luck. Fortunately, today’s little outing got off to a cracking start with luck knocking on my door. With the kids off site this weekend, the grounds were eerily quiet, even for a Sunday morning. I guess that’s why one of the forest’s more secretive residents made it all the way up onto the main drive this morning.

Muntjac deer are such fascinating little creatures. They keep some of our boys up at night with their barking in the summer, and unlike some deer species they’re quite fearless if you cross paths with one in the wild: I’ve had what can only be called a stand-off with a buck in the woods on my way into town more than once (and probably with the same individual). This one didn’t hang around for long, and if I’d not happened to look out of the window as I was getting dressed I’d probably have missed it.

I managed to make it out into the windswept wilds of Berkshire this weekend. I haven’t been up that way since a school retreat to Daoui a few years ago, and I remember feeling spellbound by the place then (well, I was certainly spellbound by the evening prayers, that much is true). On the way, signs that the year is very much on the turn were everywhere. Masses of frogspawn in the usual spots in the forest. Crocuses pushing up through the bracken as the snowdrops wilt away. The explosive chattering of a roving band of siskins in the treetops. And, Berkshire being Berkshire, red kites absolutely everywhere. I swear I saw more kites than pigeons today.

Climbing high up onto the downs above the hamlet of Inkpen, I even heard my first skylark of the year, merrily singing its heart out as it soared skywards. I haven’t seen any swallows or martins yet, but spring is certainly well on the way.

Standing tall upon the summit of Inkpen Beacon is a lonely-looking structure that can be seen for miles around: the Combe Gibbet. As we climbed towards it, my dear friend and learned guide Kate (one half of the dynamic duo that were Langlesby Travels) regaled me with its dark history: as the story goes, it was built in the year 1676 for the hanging of local murderers George Bromham and Dorothy Newman after the double murder of Bromham’s wife and son, the only obstacles to their unrequited love. For Bromham’s infidelity and the brutality of their actions – they supposedly bludgeoned the mother and child to death before hiding the bodies in a nearby dew pond – they were hanged by the neck in Winchester and their bodies displayed high upon the hilltop for all to see. Apparently the sight could be seen from “several counties”, which seems a bit of a stretch, though it really did feel like you were on top of the world up there on Inkpen Beacon. It’s always an incredible feeling when you’re looking down on the raptors wheeling through the air below.

I was particularly keen to see the gibbet because I’m currently looking into the Great Plague of Seville and the curious habits of the plague doctors of the 17th century. There – I’m sure you’ve got that image in your head already: the broad-rimmed hat, the long, heavy black robes, leather gloves and – of course – the sinister, raven-beaked mask. It’s hardly surprising that the plague doctor became associated with despair. I’ve read somewhere that when Venice was devastated by the plague, the bird-like plague doctors were quite a common sight along its canals. I’ll have to do some exploring to that effect when I’m out there in just over a month’s time.

We were followed on the way down the Beacon by one of the Combe’s kites, wheeling lazily in the spring sunshine, its forked tail steering it effortlessly over our heads without a single wingbeat. I’ve always been in awe of kites. If it weren’t for the utter majesty of the griffon vulture, I might well hold the kite close to my heart as my favourite bird of all. It’s certainly a bird that’s been a part of my life for years, from the black kites of the Raya Real to the termite-hunting horde that haunted the Bishop’s Residence in Lira, Uganda, almost a decade ago. A solitary raven drifted mightily on the wind on the way home, a couple of hares skidded up the banks and out of sight as we passed, and a bullfinch was singing its mournful song from the hedgerow as we reached Kate’s car. Berkshire’s an expensive part of the UK to live for various reasons, but I never knew just how healthily wild it was until today. I guess the downs I can see from my window are every bit as breath-taking, if I could only reach them somehow. Still – that’s something to look forward to, I suppose.

Walking home in the dark, I almost had a conversation with a fox. A vixen, I think it was – it didn’t have that long face with the sunken eyes that dog foxes do. She froze in the middle of the track like wild things sometimes do, and if a man hadn’t come by walking his dog, I could have sworn we might have gone on looking at each other. Dogs and foxes have something of a chequered past, though, and at the first sound of the approaching mutt it was off into the verge and gone without a trace.

Today was a wild day, and wild days are always easy to write about when you’re as big a nature nut as I am. Write what you know, I suppose. Now if only there weren’t already a famous nature writer called BB, I might just squeeze my way into that very cramped market. Since when was BB short for Denys Watkins-Pitchford, anyway? BB x

I’m the Bad Guy: Writing Villains

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Somewhere in my room there’s a programme from a school play I was in back in my prep school years. A few of the lead roles were interviewed about their respective parts, and the boy playing Cardinal Richelieu said he “liked playing the baddie because it is more of a challenge.” My reaction to that line has changed very little over the last twenty-odd years.

Bull. Shit.

If twenty years of writing stories have taught me anything, writing villainy is easy – sometimes, alarmingly easy. Ambition, greed, selfishness and ego are everywhere. Depending on the orientation of your moral compass, you might even be inclined to disregard some of these behaviours out of hand as simple human nature. If you want a challenge, try writing or playing a hero. Finding convincing dialogue and/or motivations for a hero is hard because heroes require hard work: they are what we can become if we can find the strength and the courage to rise above our own desires. Selfishness, the root of villainy, however, is in us all by default. It doesn’t take much to make a villain, just – what did Heath Ledger’s Joker say again? – “a little push”.

What’s the first image that comes into your head when you think of a villain? I imagine it’s rather different to the image in my head. If I were a betting man, I’d wager it’s probably not the moustache-twirling Dick Dastardly-type, which went out of fashion a long time ago. The movie-going public seems to have lost its taste for gleefully evil baddies (so much for Palpatine!) in favour of the tormented anti-hero with quasi-legitimate motivations (a la Thanos). Avatars of utter darkness are on the out, and they’re taking their more rational minions with them. In some cases, this has led to the near-total disappearance of the bad guy altogether (see Inside Out and Moana, or even Encanto).

As a writer, this saddens me, for much the same reasons as the destruction of statues bothered me a few years back. Doing away with the villains of our world is like smashing up a mirror; just because you can’t see them anymore, it doesn’t mean to say they’ve gone altogether. We need to be reminded of the depths of our depravity from time to time. Every villain is a warning in his or her own way of the capacity for darkness in all of our hearts, and from them we learn to avoid their mistakes.

Unlike the heroes of my tales, the primary baddie has hardly changed since his inception. His wardrobe may have been updated a couple of times over the years, but his appearance has never shifted. The bald, skull-like head, the high cheekbones, the small black goatee and those piercing, eye-blue eyes… The latter have always seemed to me the most treacherous, wicked eye colour around, though that may have something to do with Daniel Craig’s early-career role as the fantastically sadistic Afrikaner Sgt Botha in The Power of One. Until very late in the Spanish rewrite he bore the name Jasper Snyde, and it was primarily the strength of his surname that held me back from Hispanicising the rest of the names in the book. It took a long time before I found a Spanish equivalent I was happy with. In the end I opted for De Salma, for the simple reason that, if elided (or spoken at the speed at which your average Spaniard speaks), it winds up sounding a lot like desalmada, meaning “soulless” – or, more literally still, “deprived of a soul”.

That’s right, middle school me. Authors do put that much thought into the names of their characters. It’s not just a trick English teachers play on you to get you thinking when it’s coursework season.

I think the thing I like best about Desalma is that he is nothing more and nothing less than a product of my own jealousy. Perhaps that’s why jealousy is one of his defining traits. Some villains you create to serve a purpose within the wider story arc, others are heroes who just weren’t good enough. Desalma is neither of these. He appeared fully-formed in a moment of weakness in my teenage years, moulded about an imagined rival for the attentions of a girl I had a thing for at the time. The crush didn’t last long, and the jealous rage that birthed him was even shorter-lived, but Desalma stayed, growing cancer-like from that first appearance into an evil that transcended all of the villains I’d written into my stories.

Like the Batman’s Joker, he wasn’t supposed to survive the story in which he first appeared, but over time his hold on me grew too strong, and for the greater part of the last decade he’s been the primary antagonist and tormentor of my hero. An avatar of desperation and despair to counterbalance’s the hero’s unyielding clutch on hope.

The other villains in the saga are, predictably, drawn from the other dark desires of my heart. One of my hero’s primary flaws was almost certainly one of my own in my younger years: that is, a magnetic hero worship of the tall, dark charismatic types who hold all the cards. The ones who have the looks, get the girls, crack the jokes and seem to have it all together. It was only too easy to morph the idols of my youth into adversaries whose intentions were not what they seemed, if only to repeat that old saying that has never lost any currency: handsome is as handsome does – or rather, looks can be deceiving.

If I’m being honest, there’s been more than one occasion in my life when I’ve asked myself that question: wait – am I the bad guy here? It was especially poignant in my university years, where my tendency towards strong opinions and the sharing of said opinions got me into hot water with my fellow students. I found my views challenged so often, so vehemently, and seemingly by everybody else that, for a time, I genuinely started to doubt my own convictions. It’s so easy to start thinking you’re in the wrong when it seems like the rest of the world is against you. Israel. Free speech. Gospel music. No matter where I went, I always seemed to be on the wrong side.

Fortunately, most people aren’t walking around with a fictional universe that exists only inside their heads, and have long since learned to see the world through the mature eyes of a working professional adult. Perhaps it’s only those of us who cling to the world of good and evil, and light and dark, that insist on still making such a clear distinction between right and wrong. The grey in between is good enough for your average Joe.

I’ve been working on a new villain this week, between teaching the passé composé and marking Year 9 Spanish assessments. In recent years I’m much more inclined to letting my heroes suffer if it makes them into stronger characters at the end of it. I gave up on Ildefonso Falcones’ La mano de Fatima years ago because I lost all faith in the protagonist, but the more I read my Spanish histories, the more convinced I am that the world was a much darker place back then, just as Ildefonso Falcones painted it, and my stories need to adapt to reflect that. It takes a serious brush or two with the dark side of our hearts for us to see whether we have hero material in us or not.

I’m leafing through Leanda de Lisle’s White King to clue up on the politics of Charles I (the Civil War era being contemporaneous with my saga), but also to glean some inspiration for a better-dressed baddie in the mould of a Buckingham or Richelieu. Desperados I have aplenty, and their motivations are easy to script: hunger will make a villain out of anyone. It’s the folks at the top I’m working towards now. Time, I think, for an exploration of power and its malicious influence.

Four years in, I think I have a much clearer idea of power. Because if you want to get a real handle on power, work in a boarding school. And that’s all I’ll say on the matter. BB x