Letter from A. Broad

Tom Peck writes in the Independent, “The message is go back to work. The guidance is stay at home. So that is clear then.” On Sunday morning’s Andrew Marr Show, Michael Gove, the Minister of the Cabinet, was speaking, and I couldn’t stop imagining him dusting and polishing the table while making sure the water glasses were clean and sparkling on their coasters, as he clearly said, “I don’t think wearing face masks should be compulsory, but it is the polite and sensible thing to do”. For the first time in weeks I was nodding along with him, at the word – polite.

Monday morning Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister you remember, urged the public to wear face-masks in shops. “I think in shops it is very important to wear a face covering. Whether we make it mandatory or not, we’ll be saying a bit more in the next few days.” By Monday evening it is compulsory. One for Cummings behind Boris, nil for Gove.

Sunday was also a Big Birthday as the other member of this household of two turned 77. Upside down 77 could look like two deck chairs sitting out in the sunshine but we know not to sit still for too long. The day brought a first in four months: lunch at a restaurant with two other couples. The restaurant garden with outdoor seating was full at this Sunday lunch-time. But it is strange to know that though we may walk beside each other we cannot hug. This small curb checks us back to when we were children with parents who didn’t do hugging. Lunch is lovely and after our goodbyes leads to a long afternoon nap.

But on a birthday, a big birthday as the years, not us, get older, it is fun to find a reason to gather and celebrate. Brane Zivkovic from New York University first comes up with the idea for his students. Then he reaches out to Randy Thom from Skywalker and Taghi Amirani with the Coup53 team. And suddenly there is a surprise Zoom party and I have stage directions to follow! They zoom like fishing, dropping a line into the river of our lives, hooking those bites and making connections with long ago colleagues and friends. There are folks in party hats and with balloons, the number 77 in case we forget what birthday this is. There are chuckles bringing forth deep and long-ago memories to share. Our children and grandchildren are enjoying the moments, too. It is filled with rememberings, gosh did that really happen? Yes it did. And laughter, more laughter. We are all hungry to connect while holding in our hearts a longing for the physicality of each other that is still a long way off. With a tilt of a camera here a half-closed eye for focus and imagination, we could even all be at the farm, with people flowing from one room or screen to another. After the final click goodbye we sit back, grateful for this time we live in, while remembering those who are torn apart from families and friends throughout the world.

And for Monday, what about a nice little picnic on the river? It seemed like a good idea and we sensibly took off to Kingston in an Uber. It was strange to be out in the ‘real world.’ And truthfully we were a little intimidated by it. There are facilities to find, instructions to heed before we finally are in a tiny little GoBoat and heading out onto the Thames river. The boat is small and slow. The river is big, but we are alone and can take off our masks and spread out a picnic on the table. Steering to river rules, we begin to see what semi-suburban England is looking like and going through. There are swans, geese, ducks and a few grebes on the water circling us, more curious than hungry for the chips we toss to them. The blackberry vines dip into the water and their lush berries are already ripening. Looking back towards Westminster I thought of Henry and Thomas in Tudor times and wondered how long it took to row up river from Westminster to Hampton Court when you were summoned to the King in residence.

Today there is no hurry. People are wiling away their time, lingering on the river banks. There are groups of children gathered together, unmasked, as they play in and around the water. Boys teasing girls, boys showing off for girls, boys daring each other to climb and jump higher than before from this or that branch into the river. A few out-of-work young men are fishing – that occupation of doing something and nothing.

The smug and comfortable detached houses, with gardens and moorings are sad, rejected for this year at least, left like old lovers to fend for themselves. There are no renters to prepare for, no holiday makers to the river. The lawns are uncut, Buddleja grabs hold in borders waiting for the butterflies to find their blossoms. Even the few potted begonias fail to convince anyone that this year is not over before it began.

The house boats are tied up in rows, barely bobbing with the river’s ebb and flow. The spring chores of painting and polishing have hardly begun as we enter mid-summer. Maybe I am wrong, maybe it is just Monday on the river, but it feels like the river, the community, and thus the country is in retreat.

As are we, now we are safely back home. A deeper acceptance of this moment in history has set in and we are mindful of what is before us.

This has been A Letter from A. Broad written and read for you by Muriel Murch.

So Stanley Johnson, the Prime Minister’s father, went to Greece, by way of Bulgaria, you understand, so that he didn’t break any laws. Greece has banned flights from the United Kingdom, whose numbers of infections and deaths from the Coronavirus are the worst of the European Countries. Greece’s travel restrictions, among its other measures, has kept Greece very safe, with only 192 deaths as of this writing. But between Papa Johnson and Dominic Cummings, the leader of this conservative government has made a mockery of any laws or regulations they laid out for the rest of the country.

The actions by those close to the government are disheartening, but I too know families that have gone to the country, singletons returning to parents, and children dropped off with the grandparents for weeks of this 100 + day lockdown.

But this weekend the unlocking of England began. Many pub owners were delighted while others felt that a slower opening might have been better. Hotels, restaurants and barber shops also opened and one can only hope that the Prime Minister manages to get a haircut soon. The whizzing of e-mails back and forth uncovered plans for a Rave on Primrose Hill. Quickly, a cat-and-mouse, cops and robbers, plan was in place. Here in NW1, on the Hill, it could have been more of a game, under the cover of ‘the law.’ But instead of the police, the weather played rough, reducing the real possibility of someone getting hurt – on either side of the law.

But that didn’t save Bianca Williams, while driving their Mercedes car home in Maida Vale. The 200-meter sprinter along with her partner, the Portuguese athlete, Ricardo Dos Santos, was stopped and handcuffed. She has a voice, and spoke out, “that just being black is a crime”.

The law, a twisting turning apparatus, is rarely used for the people it is meant to protect. We watch in deep sadness at Hong Kong where speech is silenced, books are burned and the young protesters are caught in the net of the new authority from Beijing. England is making an effort to honour the people of Hong Kong but a rumbling rupture is coming from the Chinese Embassy in London, “That to interfere with China’s international policies will bring consequences”. Until now protestors outside of the embassy have been concerned with Organ Harvesting, Muslim camps, Uighur and Tibetan exiles. Today Hong Kong students and their supporters gather to denounce the Chinese Communist Party.

Meanwhile the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh are at Windsor. The Duke and Duchess of Cornwall are at one home or another. The Cambridges are comfortable in Norfolk, though with three children under the age of seven, comfortable is a relative term. Now they are returning to work, all abiding to the guidelines and laws laid out by this government.

A saying that often brings laughter in our family is ‘The Apple does not fall far from the Tree’.

A website on English Language says that this saying is first attributed in America to Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1839. But looking further back in history, always a fun thing to do, I find older versions,
“The apple does not fall far from the stem,” in German.
From Wales in 1803 “Ni fell zygwyz aval o avall” ”The apple will not fall far from the tree”.
The English attribute the saying to the Germans, the Germans to the Turks, and the Turks to the Russians. The Russians attribute it to themselves.
But in 1585 is a quotation from Megiserus that is still used in Turkish, “Elma Gendy aghadschindan irk duscgnéz”, “The apple does not fall far from its own tree.” Stanley Johnson’s paternal grand-father, Ali Kemal, was Turkish, and came to an untimely end between one regime and another.

It is interesting to see where and how family apples are falling. Our Royal Family abides by the rules laid out by the government even as The Duchess of Cornwall, talks of longing to hug her grandchildren.

When we took our Sunday walk in the park there were more family groups huddled together, all at a distance, one from the other, three generations sharing their picnic on a blanket and now the park toilets are open – a big relief. There were children’s footballs, bikes and scooters and the cry “Granny, Granny, Look Granny.” My heart ached more than a little when we walked by.

As weeks become months in this new reality, trust in the governing bodies of all of the countries affected by the coronavirus is more important than ever. But when one is faced with first the Cummings lad and then the Johnson father behaving as if the law is one for you and nil for me, trust in this Conservative Government under Boris Johnson has gone missing.

Stanley produced three other siblings to Boris, all dropped from the Johnson tree. Plop. But which branch of the tree do they come from? Some may have rolled a little further afield than Boris who looks to have stayed as close to the old trunk as he could, and didn’t roll anywhere.

The virus is still with us, but the infection and death rates are finally falling in the United Kingdom. This morning, as neighbors returned from their weekly shopping, unloaded their bags and scurried away into their apartment the Uber driver reached into the boot of his car for his bottle of disinfectant. Wearily, but thoroughly, he sprayed and wiped every area that he knows they have touched. For him and most others, vigilance is still a necessary part of his life and this world.

This has been A Letter from A. Broad. Written and read for you by Muriel Murch.

Strawberries are Ripe.

If I was to have another jab under the jacket of the government I see them in my mind’s eye zooming around their screens in search of the national unlocking with ‘a little bit here and a little bit there’ while trying to hold unrest and disruption in check. What they can’t control is the weather and the changing the English temperament.

They started with the garden centers, insane on the one hand and brilliant on the other. For anyone with a garden and wanting to DO something, getting dug in would ease off pressure like a slow puncture in a bicycle tire. What next? Shopping. Who knew how many people shop for shopping’s sake ?

Now something for the Yobs and the Snobs, to be unkind – which I will try not to be. Street markets. Stalls opened up, shops became markets and the Camden Market, just newly renovated last year, is open for business along with the Farmer’s Markets.

Primrose Hill Market opened up three weeks ago. Nope – not going on the first week. The second week we joined the long queue that shuffled along both sides of Primrose Hill, everyone making an effort at social distancing. The market was sparse, war weary, and I wanted to buy something from everyone just to help them feel it was worth the effort.

Mid-morning on week three we return. The day is blustery as if spring is pouting into summer. There is no queue. We are welcomed by the volunteers and the sweet young thing who is trying to sell her own mixture of hand sanitizer at the gate. But at £ 5.00 a bottle it’s pricey. “How do you like the smell?” “It’s very nice.” But I don’t add at this point that I don’t care how my hands smell from sanitizer. The market looks a little better as if a week’s rest has helped. But there are still big holes where stalls used to be. Where is farmer Geoff and his vegetables and eggs from Canterbury, the fishmonger from Poole, the local London honey and the wonderful Italian Pasta ladies? Even jolly Tony has sent a younger man from his dairy. For some market stalls this has been a swift axe blow, others are in hibernation, licking wounds inflicted by the virus induced lockdown. Vegetables are rotting in fields, but livestock still needs care, growth and slaughter. The two butchers are here and I shop from one.

And so is Carlo from the organic fruit farm in Kent where the soft berries are bursting on their vines and the ripe cherries dripping from the trees. Carlo has brought them all. He is a fast-talking, fast-working Eastern European who has an ease of knowing and selling that makes me wonder where he came from. Was he raised on a farm? Did his grandmother and mother want the same fruit that I do? For he has my strawberries. The berries that do not make the grade for elegant strawberries tarts or the Wimbledon tennis parties that are not happening this year, the little ones, odd shaped and more deeply flavorful from having been left in the field a little longer, in the hopes that they would turn into something prettier. Carlo knows that I want mine for jam and he has set aside – for ladies of a certain age – a few punnets of these berries. He tips three into a bag for me and I add some cherries for a morning coffee treat.

Standing at the sink and hulling the berries is soothing. The berries are small and flavorful and as I started them right away there are only three to be taste tested. Into the pan they go, layered with preserving sugar that is available for those of us who still do such things and a younger generation replaying their childhood memories and making new ones for their own families.

As children, out from boarding school for Sunday lunch, we would be sent ‘into the garden to see if you can find some berries,’ Did we ever. We had a huge bed of strawberries in the kitchen garden. Covered in high netting so that the gardener could walk through, the plants laid on fresh straw that reflected the sunlight and kept the berries clean. But first there were birds who had been caught in the netting to capture, and set free, before eating all the berries we picked before lunch which, of course, included strawberries and home made ice cream.

But now there are just the two of us in a little cottage in London to enjoy the fresh berries and make a little jam. After coffee the strawberries are hulled and layered together with the preserving sugar all smelling so sweet, a check that we have not lost our sense of smell. They will slowly absorb the sugar for 24 hours before I turn the heat on to bring it all to a rolling boil.

In the farm kitchen there is a jar full of spoons and one is ‘the jam spoon’ that over the years has been honed into shape, one side growing straighter from stirring and lifting to see the two drops come together as one and tell me that the jam or jelly is done. I have only one long-handled wooden spoon in the cottage and over time this too is beginning to change as the drops form with promise of the gifts that are to come.

This has been a Letter from A. Broad.
Written and read for you by Muriel Murch

The Summer Solstice has brought bright sunshine. But there are no trips to Stonehenge to divine what the sun’s rising foretold today’s Druids. The longest day turns us to face the oncoming months of summer and review the fruition of the last few months of solitude. We are lucky and blessed, each with work that can be done sitting in a dressing gown on the sofa or – as some of us prefer – dressed for reclining out on the terrace.

We are also surrounded by a wonderful mix of neighbors gently watching out for us all. Tentative new friendships have begun between those of us who have been aware of each other for a mere twenty years. I now know that Leslie likes to read historical fiction, ‘I’ve got bookcases full of ‘em. You are welcome to borrow anything, come over any time.” She now knows that many of the flowers she enjoys when looking out of her window come from my mother’s garden.

Pressure on the government by ministers, businesses and the economy is growing. Non-essential shops have begun to open, though I’m not too sure what separates essential and non-essential, and for whom. One of my essential shops remain unable to get to their Piccadilly warehouse for what I require.

“The Prime Minister will share his outlines for reopening the economy on Tuesday.” The Government hands out information like school homework assignments and I’m not getting too excited about what Tuesday might bring. There will still be queues outside of the shops, there will still be people mindful of how they walk, and others uncaring as they pass you. And this new reality does not bear looking into too far ahead. Whatever Tuesday’s briefing may bring, I know that ‘we will never get back to normal, how things were.’ Intellectually I understand that, I really do. But emotionally I am a little worn down.

A friend and I had a socially-distanced wine bar meeting in the Library Garden. But as she steadies me down off of the ladder, where I have climbed for a little pruning, I longed to take her hand. Another friend is coming for tea in the Square’s garden on Wednesday. Will we be able to hug each other then?

Touch is the glue that holds us together. The skin is our biggest organ, it covers, protects and feeds us all at one time. Again we are lucky, there are two of us living side by side and touch is as much a part of our lives as is ‘time for a cup of tea then?’

The moments of solitude and intense personal work can also be a time to pause and look inward. It is James Baldwin’s clarity of thought and literary articulation in his essay ‘Faulkner and Desegregation’ that helps me delve into the minutiae of my mind and think of the prejudices that I carry.

“Just because they speak the same language, remember, they are still foreigners.” Said my mother in 1964 as I sat on her bed late one evening before leaving for America. I was appalled, as I often was, at ‘the things my mother says.’ I left for America determined to pay no attention to her words. It took a month, six weeks at most, for our cluster of three Irish and one English nurses to start squawking at how the Americans we met, patients, doctors and fellow nurses, behaved. Where was their stiff upper-lip? Did everything need to be written out before we got a patient out of bed? What, in other words, was the matter with these people? Our little gang of gals grumbled our way through winter into spring. New York and all across America was in racial turmoil during those months and on throughout the summer.

My mother arrived in July for my marriage (to an American!) in August. She came bearing gifts, lists and more scoldings on what I still had to get done in the remaining two weeks and also with an openness that put me to shame. For her ‘They are different’ translated into a sincere effort to understand the differences she encountered in the Americans she met. Naturally, she found more similarities than differences, and absorbed them all.

After the Friday morning wedding and lunch time snack we left, heading out for a six week motorcycle Odyssey to California. My mother stayed with her new relatives for the weekend. I can only image that after we had left, and the guests slowly finished up the sandwiches, champagne and tea, and also departed, my new in-laws, the grandmother and uncle who had flown down from Toronto and my mother had all sat down together with some relief. Conversation would have relaxed as they sipped something soothing and maybe smoked a little before dinner.

On Sunday our mothers went to hear Martin Luther King speak at Riverside Church. For my mother whose knowledge of Africans was from Africa this must have been an extraordinary event giving her another glimmer of understanding. And a glimmer is maybe all that most of us can hope for however hard we try.

Fifty-five years later I look back, and see how far we have not come, how much work there is still to do and how the tap and tide of human kindness does not always seem to be turning clockwise. On our little terrace I try not to be discouraged as I add Hibernation Gin to the Elderflower cordial and listen to the blackbirds calling to their fledglings. But I can smile and give thanks for all the young people we have raised who are finding those glimmers of understanding and a light to shine for us all.

This has been A Letter from A. Broad
Written and read for you by Muriel Murch

After three months in lockdown it was time to venture beyond NW1 deeper into the city at West 2. My audiologist was working through his waiting list of patients and my name came up. With two small children at home, he was, frankly, happy to be working.

“The 274 bus will take you to Marble Arch and then it is a five minute walk.” But running late I hailed a taxi. The cabbie kept his windows open and I my mask and gloves on. Late but not too late, I followed Mark into his back room wondering how is this going to work. But the appointments are spaced 15 minute apart to clean the rooms. He took a brief history and looked at my old aides, trying to hide his amazement.
“These are 9 years old.”

Into the box I go and testing begins. The spacing between beeps is far too long. This is not good. Nor is his final verdict, “You might want to tell your children. And these,” he concludes looking again at my old friends, “are no longer Fit for Purpose.”

He sets me up anew and I will read the directions several times to get the best out of my National Health aides. My fingers are crossed and my glasses adjusted hoping that these new friends will ‘See me out.’

Not Fit for Purpose. One thing to say that about an old, but still working, appliance, but a little different for a person.

Though stooped low with osteoporosis, Howard still walks as if about to run. Under his scruffy black cap his sparse, long hair flows behind him. Howard was a fine tennis coach in the small sports center at the north end of Regent’s Park. There were four tennis courts, a golf practice range and cricket nets. But a fresh administration, a clean sweep with a new broom, and the golf and tennis areas were cleared away to increase wilderness for the hedgehogs. A catering hub was built overlooking the newly laid out cricket and football pitches now there was money saved and money earned.

The little tennis club at the other end of the park grew, attracting sweet young things and handsome jocks. And the staff had to fit that look. Howard and his Russian friend did not make the cut and his friend was so devastated he committed suicide. Howard manfully struggles on. Now as his knees and heart age he often stops to rest on his hurried walks back from the village. In this coronavirus loneliness he feels keenly ‘Unfit for Purpose’.

George Floyd’s murder has brought much of the world to attention and the last two weekends in England have been marked with protest marches for ‘Black Lives Matter’ and the BAME communities. And once again the protests have been mucked about by nationalists looking for a good ‘bust up.’ There is no football, no beer and few jobs. Ironically, Nazi Nationalists are seen defending Churchill’s statue while a very buff Patrick Hutchinson tosses an older white skin-head over his shoulder, because, as he said, ’He was separated and needed to get back to his people.’

When Edward Colston’s statue was pulled from his pinnacle in Bristol, graffitied, today’s version of tarred and feathered – then rolled and tossed into the harbour from whence landed his slave trading fortune, people began to look around. Who else glorified a past built on the enslavement of others for the enrichment of trade? Even Oxford University faced its mixed messages of Cecil Rhodes and Nelson Mandela. “We are going to have to work together now you and I” Mandela said to the statue when he set up the Mandela Rhodes Trust in 2003 to help heal racial divisions.

In London, Winston Churchill’s doomed statue stands on Parliament Square. One weekend graffitied and the next – to protect and possibly buy time – he was boxed up. One couldn’t help smiling – just a little – at the irony of this move. Boris Johnson huffing and puffing that his hero Winston Churchill had to be put in a box and that Sadiq Khan, the son of a London bus driver and now major of London after Boris, was the one to do it. Surely even Boris might have a glimmer of understanding that these statues, even that of his beloved Winston, might now be considered Not Fit for Purpose. This week’s attention is on Clive of India – another dastardly (the word fits) fellow, who is tucked away in Whitehall.

But how do we remember history? How do we teach it, respecting what was good while acknowledging the mostly unrecognized, unspoken atrocities that each and every country inflicts on those who stand in their way or from whom they can benefit?

Typically Johnson has proclaimed ‘A committee will be formed to review race relations’. Some in government will laugh and chuckle, while those in minority communities across the country will weep with resignation at this announcement. Reviews after racial incidents have been happening since race relations began to overtake class inequalities in import. It has been hard to track the snail’s pace of change in this country. But maybe this can be the time, as families from the countries we have plundered march and kneel together, to keep pressure on this government to look again, not only at the statues but in the class-rooms and work to do more for an England that is ‘Fit For Purpose’ in today’s world.

This has been a Letter from A. Broad, Written and read for you by Muriel Murch