Free for three: Invasion and Refuge

Have managed to skip February in this blog but that's probably down to the fact that my OU course began and I've been totally immersed in early 20th century history.

Today I found a way to combine a free activity with my studies by attending a free lunchtime talk at the Wiener Library.

Free talk: 'Testimonies/Témoignages' - Documenting the Stories of Refugee Children Rescued into Switzerland During World War II

Samantha Lakin has been researching the histories of refugee Jewish children who escaped into Switzerland. In her talk, Samantha gave us a brief glimpse into the lives of two of the survivors who managed to join the all too small group of children who were permitted to cross into Switzerland, aided by French adults who risked their lives to help them pass.

Lone children under 16 and families with children under 5 were, in theory, given refuge in Switzerland, but in practice these lone children had to rely on luck and sympathetic border guards to grant them safe passage to the orphanages and welcome camps that were set up by organisations like the Salvation Army, the Red Cross and Jewish groups to look after the children. Young children were expected to walk for several days, often badly shod and ill clothed through the mountains before crossing barbed wire and a no man's land patrolled by armed guard to get to safety. Older children were sometimes given babies to carry. Even if they made it, there was no guarantee they would be permitted to stay.

We were also reminded that these kids were the lucky ones. So many children and their families were rounded up from 1942 and deported to the death camps. The survivors themselves made clear in their testimonies that they were not badly treated and were grateful for their escape.

Painful to contemplate that these atrocities were committed in living memory. Even more painful to be reminded by a short poetry reading from an Iraqi refugee academic that war continues to make children refugees and victims.

Earlier in the week I paid a visit to the new Furtherfield exhibition in Finsbury Park.

Free exhibition: Being Social

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, Flickr...so many ways to share all our waking moments, the highs and lows, the funny and the tragic. Chances are, you are all using some form of social media, even if only membership of Harringay Online.

Does this new technology change us? More and more, people, especially the young, are sharing intimate details and feelings online, where they can be accessed easily by strangers. Being Social, the new exhibition at Furtherfield’s gallery in Finsbury Park explores our relationship with social technology and asks questions about our willingness to share so much of ourselves.

All the exhibits are fascinating; these are the ones that particularly provoked a reaction from me:

‘Kay’s Blog’ by Liz Sterry is a reproduction of Kay’s bedroom based entirely on reading Kay’s blog. Liz lives in England, Kay is a teenager living in Canada. Thinking about photos and thoughts shared via social media, it makes you wonder how easy it might be for someone to do the same with your own domestic world.

A tweet wall is a stream of consciousness. Tweets collected around Finsbury Park on a certain day expressing many emotions (and quite a lot of thoughts about football) have been captured by Jon and Ali. Reading them altogether is like suddenly being granted telepathy and able to hear everyone’s thoughts at the same time. Twitter is sometimes referred to disparagingly as the ‘hive mind’, but this exhibit suggests the opposite, a raging sea of disjointed thoughts and feelings.

We’ve all heard of people who create multiple identities online, maybe some of you reading this have more that one online ID. Karen has turned that idea on its head by allowing multiple personalities to create her. Invited people are permitted to interact with others on the internet as Karen. Karen doesn’t hide behind by anonymous ids, she is hidden because you can no longer be sure that the person you are interacting with is Karen.

Finally, what if you want out? What if you decide that you want to disappear from social media altogether. It’s not as easy as you’d imagine, but the people at modd_r have built a machine to commit web2.0 suicide to definitively delete all social media profiles. If you go will you miss it? Will you be missed?

I was intrigued and challenged by this exhibition. As an enthusiastic user of social media and a great believer in its use for collective action and inclusion, it provoked me to thinking about how we help a generation who has barely known a world without social media to understand its power and pitfalls and build a relationship with the new technologies that allows them to use it safely and effect the change they want with it, without being ruled by it...and even giving them a way out of it if they have had enough.

Being Social is open until 28th April Thurs-Sat 12-3 in the Furtherfield Gallery, Mckenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park.
Free workshops every Saturday 10-1 (booking advisable, info@furtherfield.org)
Furtherfield

Free book: The Invasion of 1910 by William Le Queux

A piece of alarmist popular fiction from 1906 that imagines the German invasion of England, notable as having started its life as a serial in the Daily Mail (the Mail promoting fear of foreign invasion, how unusual!) who went as far as dressing up their newspaper sellers as Prussian soldiers and posting fake headlines about Germans marching on the Home Counties.

An extract from it was printed in my primary sources book for my course, but I had to admit to being tickled by it as it imagines that the surprise invasion would be via Suffolk (Lowestoft) my county of birth. The list of towns and villages taken by the invading forces read like a list of my days out as a kid, so although it isn't exactly high art, I couldn't help turning the pages.

Although it turned out to be fantasy, the book also gives a little shiver of recognition that it could have been my great-grandparents fleeing for their lives from their little rural backwater in East Anglia away from an invading force, a situation that unlike most of Europe, we in England are fortunate enough to have avoided for hundreds of years. We should always be grateful for that.

Available from Project Guthenburg or as an audiobook from LibriVox (American reader)

The Cloud Factory

Heard this tonight by accident, sung by June Tabor.

These are the words...or, I should say, this is the poem.

The Cloud Factory
(Bill Caddick)

My father worked in the Cloud Factory,
He'd come home wreathed in dreams each day
My Mother took his cloudy clothes
To brush the threads of dreams away.
She'd scold and say "you and your dreams,
They're just for kids and fools like you."
But Father he'd just wink his eye and smile and say "Are you sure that's true?"

Chorus
My Father taught me how to sing. He sang that dreams were everything,
Can't be bought and can't be sold, More than silver,more than gold.

My Mother thought him fanciful,
She used to chide him all the while,
But me, I thought him wonderful,
Do anything to see him smile.
I used to hear him singing low,
The words are with me to this day:
"You have to hold on to your dreams or else they simply slip away".

The last time I saw him ill and dying,
The only time I saw him cry.
Too late for dreams to come true now,
As he watched his last clouds rolling by.
Back home she opened windows wide,
And let the clouds out strand by strand
Til all but one had blown away and I caught and kept it in my hand.

My Mother doesn't do much lately
With no more clouds to clear away.
since they closed the factory down
No dreams seem to drift this way.
I found her sitting alone and still,
at first I thought her fast asleep.
But Father's coat lay in her lap and around her feet the dreams lay deep.

Chorus
She said "He taught me how to sing......

Sometimes I pass the disused factory
And gaze into the empty sky,
and if I let the fancy lead me
A dream or two comes drifting by.
Oh I'll teach my children how to sing,
To sing that dreams are everything,
Can't be bought and can't be sold,
More than silver, More than gold.

Spring is waking up and putting her face on

Hints of Spring are everywhere.

This tiny iris is blooming in our commmunity planter


and this clump of pretty little snowdrops were sighted in a Wightman Road front garden.

Three free to see

January is going by in a bit of a blur as routines kick back in and I find myself back on various sidelines holding the kids' coats or helping out at the Citizen's Advice Bureau office but I have managed to find three free things to see this month that I loved.

Free photography 

 Don McCullin at Tate Britain

This display of Don McCullin's landscapes, portraits, and photos of Berlin in 1961 stays with you for a long time. As a history student, the pictures of the building of the Berlin Wall and the armies facing off against each other across the barricades are utterly compelling. This felt like the start of World War 3 and the tension is apparent in the faces of the army personnel. Meanwhile people pose for photos and stand and watch the action in their Sunday best. I wonder what Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels would have made of a whole square being named after them. 

Don McCullin's industrial landscapes are also important. These landscapes of Yorkshire, Liverpool and Co Durham remind viewers of the enormous human cost to the Industrial Revolution. People are dwarfed, landscapes are grimy and grassfree, children go about their play in front of great piles of scrap metal or belching factories, boys play foorball on waste ground littered with rubbish, mothers push prams down roads that appear to lead into wasteland. This is the other side of heritage, the true face of the industrial landscapes so soon to be transformed into places of no industry or even cleaned up museums to a disappearing past.

I was also taken with Don McCullin's portraits of homeless people in the East End. He tells us that he wants to us to look into their eyes and really see them and his photos certainly force us to do that but the picture that stays with me is the one of a group of men standing, all asleep on their feet as though they've been switched off by an invisible hand.

Tateshorts: Don McCullin (video)

Free exhibition 

 Boxed at The South Bank

Planning your funeral might seem a bit like a morbid pastime ( I have decided on some of the music for mine though) but this exhibition of special coffins from coffin makers in Ghana and Nottingham makes it somehow less Victorian and a bit more,well, fun. 

Plain wooden boxes are so 19th century. These days, you can get 'planted' in eggs, replica cars, (small) Viking longships, or my favourite a giant corkscrew. 

The coffins from Ghana include a cocoa pod, important for the local economy and a small Mercedes, a symbol of success and wealth. 

Go have a browse. You'll probably find yourself musing on what kind of box would best symbolise your life. Could they make a coffin out of a giant bar of chocolate?

Free sculpture

Virginia Dare at St Brides

A beautiful little sculpture that is tucked away at the back of St Brides Church in Fleet Street. Made by Clare Waterhouse (1999) to replace an original (stolen) marble representation,  Viginia Dare was the first English immigrant child born in the Americas of parents who were married in St Brides in 1585.

She was born on Roanoke Island on August 19, 1587: "Elenora, daughter to the governour and wife to Ananias Dare, one of the assistants, was delivered of a daughter in Roanoke". The child was healthy and "was christened there the Sunday following, and because this childe was the first Christian borne in Virginia, she was named Virginia"