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Berlin - then and now

29/7/2015

I’ve just returned from a weekend in Berlin visiting my son. I was last there twenty years ago with Amici Dance Theatre, performing for a week in the Akademie der Kunste, a piece called Ruckblick (or flashback). Ruckblick was about the life and work of the artist, Kathe Kollwitz, whose drawings and sculptures were hated by the Nazis for their portrayal of the suffering caused by poverty and war. It was an extraordinary week – emotionally and physically exhausting, at times very sad, at other times deliriously joyful. Ruckblick was created by Wolfgang Stange, who was born at the end of the war and brought up in West Berlin. His many works bear the stamp of someone haunted by Germany’s recent history, and trying to reconcile the weight of guilt. When Germany was divided by the wall, half of his family were living in the east, so, along with so many others, they were separated. He never thought that would change during his lifetime.

It was five years after the wall had come down when we took Ruckblick to Berlin. Everything was still very raw. When we weren’t in the theatre rehearsing or performing, we were touring around a city that looked like a building site, or visiting buildings where hideous events had taken place – Wannsee, where the Nazis planned the fate of the Jews, and Plotzensee Memorial for the resistance workers who were hanged by the Nazis. I remember the bitter wind of April, and an aching sadness. That said, there were brilliant moments too – the camaraderie of the company, the great welcome we received from our hosts, roses falling from the fly-tower of the theatre after our last performance, and the late night walks back home, singing and dancing along the streets, past the river and parks. One evening a few of us were taken into East Berlin to visit an arts centre in an old school. It was the bleakest place, broken down, grey, cold, the wind and rain whipping around the corners of the blocks. We shivered as we were taken around, marvelling at the courage and resourcefulness of the artists who were trying to build a new world out of the rubble. Later, we huddled over hot chocolate in a little corner café.

My son now lives in the east, in an area called Friedrichschain. The trams are bright yellow instead of grey, the streets are lined with trees, the buildings painted in many colours, as well as covered in graffiti. There are little shops, markets, and cafés everywhere – so much life and colour and vibrancy. We walked by the river alongside the remains of the wall – how can it have been such a flimsy construct – barely six inches thickness? We sat on the riverbank, in the sunlight, drinking beer, and I marvelled that this was the same city I visited twenty years ago. How successfully the ghosts are scribbled out. Or are they?

Street behind Frankfurter Allee

Bucherboxx, Gleis 17, and Teufelberg

We took the s-bahn to Grunewald, a district on the edge of the woods. Arriving there in the sunshine, and seeing the beautiful buildings and this cheery alternative library in an old phone box, was heart-lifting, and Grunewald seemed like the ideal place to live – surrounded by trees, and yet so near to the city. It was in this elegant district that many of the wealthy Jews lived before 1940.
Between 1941 and 1945, men woman and children, destined for the ghettos of Poland or the death camps, were loaded onto cattle trucks leaving platform 17. Along the edge of the platform are embedded 186 cast steel bars inscribed with the dates of the transports, the number of people and where they were taken.
In silence we left the station and walked into the woods. The sun shone and we passed wooden chalets in the middle of allotments full of flowers and vegetables. We took a sandy track leading up to Teufelsberg, or Devil’s Hill with its far-reaching views over the trees towards the city.Teufelsberg was created with the debris of post-war Berlin. Underneath it is the remains of the never-completed Nazi military-technical college, designed by Albert Speer. The allies tried to destroy it using explosives, but it proved so robust that in the end it was easier to cover it in rubble. On the top, surrounded by a wire fence and barbed wire, and dense in dark green vegetation, is the now derelict listening station of the US National Security Agency, used during the Cold War. We walked around the perimeter. The monument itself, such as remains of it, is guarded by a group of people living in a caravan, who charge an entrance fee. It’s an eerie, sinister place, even on a bright July afternoon – a monument to distrust, dividedness, and legitimate paranoia.

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Making connection

19/7/2015

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One of the lovely things about writing a blog is that, from time to time, connections are made with complete strangers. After posting a blog about the Pillar Hotel in Elterwater, where we had our family holidays in the late 60s and 70s, I was contacted by the son of Mr Baines, who ran the hotel. Our shared memories made the place, lost though it is in so many ways, vivid again. This week I received an email from a man, who now lives in Canada, who grew up with my first dance teacher, Irene Dilks.

I was fifteen when I first met Irene, I wanted to dance very much, and she gave me all her support. Where there’s a will there’s a way, she said. For two years, every Wednesday, I left school early, and ran to the railway station for the Liverpool train, and her classes at IM Marsh College. I travelled with Jon, a twenty-two year old law student – who also danced. Reaching Liverpool, we had a cup of coffee, made with evaporated milk, in the basement café of Lewis’s, then took the bus to Aigburth Vale and the college. After one and a half classes I had to run down the hill for the bus and the last train home. In the baking hot summer of ‘76 we had summer school and danced every day for a week. I was silently in love with Jon, and he confessed one afternoon that he was desperately in love with Irene – she, at 34, seemed very old, and far beyond his reach. It’s funny to think back – such heady, emotional times, all of us taking ourselves so seriously. But from the distance of nearly thirty years it’s Irene and the dancing that I miss; the egg-shaped studio built in a hollow in the fields, the summer light pouring through the long windows, Irene – such a beautiful, elegant dancer. She was a gentle teacher, with a great sense of humour, teasing us, rather than ranting. I still hear the timbre of her voice. We all aspired to look like her – to dance with her ease and flow. Those days when my whole life stretched ahead, she opened a door to the world of dance, and how wonderful it seemed.

Irene is unreachable now – she died of cancer before she reached old age, and anyway, the past is another land, lost forever. The lovely thing about receiving emails from strangers who share a time or person, is that briefly those strands of memory flare into life again, and there’s a powerful sense of presence.

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wastelands

13/7/2015

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I grew up on the edge of a city with little access to real countryside, so the tract of land between the railway line, Liverpool Road and the steel factory was our playground – a magical wilderness, destroyed long ago, that still comes into my dreams. Now, years later, living in Derbyshire and surrounded by hills and fields, the place I love best is again a wasteland – the old industrial site belonging to Tarmac. Thirty years ago this was a barren patch of land connected by five hundred yards of overhead conveyor belt (an odd structure made of iron girders and corrugated metal) to the nearby quarry. Every week the limestone would be trundled along the conveyor belt by truck and loaded onto the freight train to make its way to Derby and beyond. Then the quarry was closed and the railway too.

When I moved to live across the road from the site, seventeen years ago, the conveyor belt still hung over the fields. Tin huts, limestone boulders, and railway sleepers littered the abandoned site, and from the lane we could peer into a deep concrete-lined pool of water with a warning sign attached to barbed wire fencing.
Ten years ago the conveyor belt was dismantled, dismaying a few locals who thought it should be preserved as a monument – then slowly, and not so slowly, nature has taken over. Through the tiniest cracks in the densely-packed limestone, the buddleia, and rosebay willow herb appeared – then the ash, silver birch, and willow.

Today it’s the most beautiful area, dissected by wandering paths created by the feet of many dog walkers. There are orchids in abundance, dog daisies, wild roses, marjoram and thyme, and more shrubs and reeds, and mosses and ferns than I can name. In August the railways is edged with banks of golden seal and a tunnel of purple buddleia, where peacock and tortoiseshell butterflies rest and flutter. It was here one evening that I stopped to listen to the miraculous song of a nightingale on the branch of an ash sapling, and where, with my cousin, I delighted in an abundance of butterflies, so many different species, one September morning at the end of the poorest butterfly summer.

In a short time this area may be flattened under bulldozers and brick – just as my childhood wasteland was – to make way for a housing estate. It’s in the Town Plan and we all need houses, we are told.

Sometimes, when I walk through a shopping mall, or drive along a motorway, I wonder what would happen if we absented ourselves, for even a short time. How long before water seeps into cracks in the structure and the first weeds appear? How long before the concrete cracks, falls, and disintegrates under moss, lichen and fungi, and the first trees take root – until finally our marks all but disappear? Then it seems to me a ludicrous arrogance to think we can destroy a world that has so little need for us.

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Remembering Johnny Crow

5/7/2015

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As my parents retreat ever deeper into old age, I find myself recalling moments of my early childhood with intense sweetness and urgency. My father was unable to relate easily to small children, but he loved both literature and art, and the one book he would read with me was ‘Johnny Crow’s Garden’ – by Leonard Leslie Brooke, first published in 1903 by Frederick Warne & Co (also the publishers of Beatrix Potter). I say read, but in fact he found reading aloud embarrassing, so I’d perch on his knee as he pointed to the various animals. ‘There’s a crow,’ he’d say. ‘A crow with a spade, digging. There’s a lion with a tie on.’ And because time with him was so rare, I remember vividly these evenings. I know it was my mother who read the whole book to me, and I was lost in a world of bizarre animals and birds, several of them semi-clothed, and a bear who had nothing to wear. Half a century later I still remember the stork who ‘gave a philosophic talk, until the hippopotami said “ask no further what am I” and the elephant said something quite irrelevant.’

Last week I bought ‘Johnny Crow’s Garden’ for my little cousin, who shows all the signs of being as literary as the best in our family. Despite it being a black and white reprint, I read it again with delight, the language and rhymes soaring off the page, and the exquisite illustrations creating a world of eccentricity, beauty, and disorder, presided over by the kindly and organised crow, who finally sits them all down for dinner in a row.

Most underrated of birds – the crow – if not the most handsome, certainly the most intelligent, creative and resourceful. It’s great to find him the hero of this wonderful children’s book, as well as further stories – ‘Johnny Crow’s Party’ and ‘Johnny Crow’s New Garden’ – books I’ve yet to discover. I hope my cousin enjoys him as much as I did. Long live Johnny Crow!

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Berlin - then and now

Bucherboxx, Gleis 17, and Teufelberg

Making connection

wastelands

Remembering Johnny Crow

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