Our current fractious world needs – indeed, yearns – for more harmony, more togetherness, more joy. On the 20th of June, at All Saints Church in Maidstone, we had all those qualities in abundance. Our spirits were encouraged to soar in a concert by Maidstone Wind Symphony and The Maidstone Singers Extended Choir on a gloriously balmy evening.
A Buddhist meditation by David Maslanka opened the concert sensitively conducted by Roger Graham with the Maidstone Wind Symphony (all talented amateur musicians) drawing us into a state of calm reflection as the music drifted around this stunning grand church. This piece, entitled ‘Give Us This Day’, set the spiritual tone for the evening.
‘O Magnum Mysterium’ by Morton Lauridsen is a “quiet song of profound inner joy”. The Wind Symphony was led gently and precisely by Roger Graham through this popular piece.
The first half closed with the surging, uplifting ‘Alleluia Laudamus Te’ by Alfred Reed, raising spirits to the ornate gilded roof – a triumphant recitation leaving us in need of interval refreshment to feed the body after the soul had been sated.
And what a second half! Karl Jenkins’ ‘The Armed Man’ was sung with passion by The Maidstone Singers. The piece is almost a musical documentary which traces both the bravery of soldiers and the utter futility of war. The choir marching on the spot set the tone. It is not simply an anti-war diatribe. It is much more subtle and, therefore, persuasive. Jenkins composed the piece as he daily watched the unfolding genocide in Kosovo. This Muslim-majority now independent country no doubt inspired him to include ‘The Call to Prayers’. This was a particularly poignant moment as Adi Usmani took to the pulpit to sing the Call in Arabic. A Call to Prayers in an Anglican church – what better message of tolerance, mutual understanding could there be rather than blind, ignorant hatred? Fly a flag for that alone.
The ‘Kyrie eleison’ was sung with great feeling by the Maidstone Singers with all eyes on their conductor, Kathryn Ridgeway, who did seem to live every nuance, every twist and turn. Her direction of the percussionists as they created an ambience of hope and horror was masterful.
We are then with the soldiers (helped by war images projected on a screen) as they prepare to go over the top almost certainty to their deaths. This is the slow, brutal horror of All Quiet on the Western Front as in the film a twisted bloodied hand in the mud slowly stills of life.
The ‘Agnus Dei’ was sensitively sung with strident dignity and we are with the soldiers who have survived staring at their dead mates. Has there ever been a more beautifully composed cor anglais solo for the Benedictus? Jenkins was himself a skilled oboist (listen to Soft Machine Six) and this solo is played beautifully.
A panoply for peace closes ‘The Armed Man’ with Tennyson’s words “Ring out the thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of peace”. As we all headed home in the warm evening air with hope renewed by this performance maybe we could see a new light in these dark times. Music matters more than ever. Thank you to all the performers.
The idea that the universe has an underlying sonic structure is as old as philosophy, and as perennial. Ancient observations of planetary orbits encouraged Pythagoras to hypothesize that just as the pitch of musical notes was determined by the rapidity of vibrations, so planets which orbited at different speeds must also make unique sounds, which harmonised as a majestic “music of the spheres”. Classical world-influenced Christian thinkers dreamed up trumpets toppling the walls of Jericho or signalling the End of Days, and the allegorical Instruments of St. Jerome, whose tuba had three mouthpieces, symbolising the Trinity, and four openings, to symbolize the Four Evangelists. Since its invention in the third century BC, the organ has been seen as much more than a machine – rather, with its air currents and complexity of construction, a metaphor of a breathing grand design.
Sir Thomas Browne called God “the First Composer” in Religio Medici, and saw music as key to universal understanding; he would have known the already old proverb “Music is the eye of the ear.” In 1921, 64 years-old Edward Elgar would write wistfully to his friend, the critic Sir Sidney Colin, “I am still at heart the dreamy child who used to be found in the reeds by Severn side, with a sheet of paper trying to fix the sounds and longing for something very great.” The music of the spheres seems inseparable from the music for our ears.
But while music can express emotions not easily conveyable in words, it can have limitations of its own, because of the imperfections of the instruments we use to “fix” the music we hear in our heads. Even the most advanced instruments are really reminders of music rather than music in themselves. In this diverting and handsomely illustrated book – an offshoot of their project www.imaginaryinstruments.org – two American organologists examine how musical visionaries have always sought to supersede the shortcomings of the tools of their trade, and surpass previous sounds.
Instruments, according to the authors’ expansive definition, are not necessarily contrivances of metal, wood and catgut, but can be wholly conceptual – a “constellation of forms, at once material and intellectual.” A radio, to these authors, can be an instrument – so too a piece of software. Instruments may not even be intended to make what we would consider musical sounds, but can be used to convey visual and even olfactory ‘music’ – colours or odours obtained by pressing keys. Conventional organologists categorise instruments according to their primary sound-producing mechanisms – for example, idiophones have vibrating bodies, and aerophones vibrating air columns – to which these authors now add ‘fictophones’, instruments which either never existed or progressed no further than prototype, yet inspired actual instruments, or otherwise resound in our imaginations. This is a highly entertaining account of artistic playfulness from ancient times to today; it also constitutes a serious study of the natures and meanings of music.
Inventive musicians in all ages have sought to make instruments that are larger, louder, sweeter or more versatile, or that can render audible otherwise undetectable sounds. While many of these experimentations led to colourful dead ends, others eventually sparked off calculus, computing, medical audiology, recording and streaming, science-fiction, and psychological concepts like synaesthesia.
Renaissance anatomical discoveries encouraged musicians in search of amplification to try and replicate the inner ear in cochlear whorls of brass. The polymath Giambattista della Porta thought it possible to trap sounds in pipes to be listened to later, a reiteration of older traditions that sounds could be frozen in mid-air, or that one of the biblical Joseph’s exhalations had been preserved in a jar held at the Vatican. Leonardo filled notebooks with ideas for instruments from kettledrums with instantaneously tuneable skins to a concept of coaxing musical correspondences from different-sized waterfalls.
Isaac Newton analogised his colour spectrum with the musical scale, which encouraged experimenters to try and make music with colours. Voltaire was dismissive of the ‘optical harpsichords’ thus envisaged, but even he allowed there might be “hidden rapports”. The early twentieth century American artist Thomas Wilfred invented the ‘Clavilux’, a silent instrument where colours were conjured by keys – a service less to music as we think of it than to the emerging genre of ‘lumia’ or light art.
Even people could almost become instruments, as seen for example in the origin story of the Arabian oud – supposedly modelled on a dead boy’s bones by his grieving luthier father – or the Austrian author-composer Johann Beer’s 1701 satire Bellum musicum, in which the forces of musical conservatism are assailed by demotic ‘bunglers’ (village fiddlers and the like) led by an ‘ambassador’ whose body is confected of musical notations and parts of instruments. So, too, could animals – at least according to the sadistic invention known as the ‘cat piano’, in which cats were allegedly fastened in rows and made to issue different yowls by being jabbed with pins. Mercifully, the cat piano seems mostly myth, but Peter the Great of Russia really did commission one in 1716, which was apparently used occasionally as late as 1803.
The Greek Aeolian harp, in which music is made by the wind passing over untouched strings, is distant ancestor to the equally unhandled theremin (invented in 1928), whose ethereal tones in turn inspired the Moog synthesiser (invented in 1964). The prophetic ‘speaking heads’ of medieval legend prefigure today’s (and tomorrow’s) robots. In 1739, the German-Danish music theorist Johann Adolf Schiebe conceived of a musikalische wunder-Maschine – a device that could not only create music but appraise its artistic worth – a satire, but a forerunner of today’s AI music generators. The Panharmonicon “mechanical orchestra” invented by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel inspired his friend Beethoven’s 1813 symphony Wellington’s Victory, and can be seen as an antecedent to today’s electronic keyboards.
Adolphe Sax envisaged gigantic steam-powered organs and an array of other impossible instruments, including a thirteen-bell trumpet, but he also gave us the saxophone. Francis Bacon’s 1526 utopian novel New Atlantis, in which his hero visits an island off Brazil where the inhabitants operate official sound-houses to “practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation” inspired Daphne Oram to co-found the BBC’s world-famous Radiophonic Workshop in 1958. Musical Prometheans still look backwards in order to look forwards, like Brian Eno whose insights into medieval bells are informing his ideas of the sounds of thousands of years hence, when bells may be built of very different materials and ring with radically different tones. Whatever that far off world might sound like, it seems certain some of us will always be straining our ears to hear yet farther.
This review first appeared in Café Americain, and is reproduced with permission
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN revisits Yellow Sky, 1948, directed by William A. Wellman
Both the triumphant and then jolly music of Yellow Sky[i], with its flippant echo of Oh! Susanna[ii] are a complete contradiction to the overall mood of the film. Whatever your definition of noir, Yellow Sky comes stylistically and psychologically close until the end. Purely noir[iii] Westerns that also have negative endings are very rare. Wellman’s later, colour Western, Track of the Cat (1954) starring that fatalistic ‘Tsar of Noir’, Robert Mitchum[iv], though regularly considered one of the bleakest of Westerns, scrapes some hope at the end – albeit not for Mitchum.
Despite being known as “Wild Bill” for his confrontational personality, womanising and World War 1 exploits as a fighter pilot, Yellow Sky’s director, William A. Wellman[v], is not a household name. A hard-working, cross-genre versatility, valuing story over distinctive personal signature, has limited easy categorisation. Obviously, I didn’t know the man . . . and whenever fashions change, biographical accounts (and lots more besides) habitually shift emphasis to be in tune with them . . . who can you trust?
The frivolous banjo of Oh! Susanna is almost withering on Yellow Sky’s soundtrack as a headline spells out: The West – 1867. When the film was released on Christmas Eve, December 1948, I expect US cinemagoers would have realised the date’s significance. Not having studied American history at school, I needed to hear the characters’ backstories to discover that the American Civil War[vi] is not long over. This setting in time (echoed roughly by the gap between the end of World War 2 and the film’s release) must be intended to partly justify, or at least explain, the wild, egotistical and reckless behaviour likely to occur on the margins of traumatised civilizations.
After the titles conclude, the stock opening music of blaring victory and light-heartedness hits a streak of menace which declines into a thunder-clap over a sunny marshland area. If opening night audiences were looking forward to Christmas, they should postpone such thoughts!
A group of seven weary-looking men, their horses splashing onward in single file, ride slowly across the screen. We are only a minute and 40 seconds into the film – including logos, titles and a fine series[vii] of sketches of ghost towns and mine ruins – and the mood, having swung all over the compass, settles here with the kind of grim certainty one associates with either stoicism or desperation. Yet the landscape looks lushly verdant, flowery and appealing before the youngest of the group spots a skull with an arrow right through it.
“Prospector.” States a man who transmits an air of authority. Since he is portrayed by Gregory Peck, we imagine that if at times he must be brutal, he will usually be fair.
“Skinny little fella. Them bones ain’t hardly as big as my little finger,” opines the portly Walrus (Charles Kemper, who had been a foil to Danny Kaye early in his career and was often to provide an element of comic relief; in Yellow Sky it is faint). Picking the powerful arrow from the two huge holes it has punched in the skull, the youthful Bull Run (Robert Arthur) takes it to the probable leader, who regards its still pristine shaft. With the possibility of vengeful or “crazy Indians” adding to the landscape’s threat, the group survey their immediate surroundings. Dude – played by Richard Widmark, seems to know the area well and starts to lay it out (00:02:48): “up north there are lots of canyons and draws . . . if you know which ones are open.” Intrigued by what a “draw” might be – does it draw you in and then prove to be a fatal dead end? – I discovered a whole chain of words[viii] which construct a hierarchy of depressions and ravines, descending into canyons. Draws are the least significant. Draws drain into arroyos, which drain into coulees, which drain into canyons. As with so many words and word origins this is both fascinating and yet disappointing – disappointing that one imagines additional mysterious meanings. But aren’t such extra implications, to some extent, what poetry and music and the visual arts rely on? How is it that great black and white photography can often suggest more depth, even more colour than colour – can look more real than the reality of colour?
Dude continues to summarise the area’s variety. I’m not sure if such environmental diversity actually exists in such close proximity to Death Valley[ix] – with fertile looking marshes, killing salt flats, canyons, hills, mountains, and a dusty desert town all within a few miles’ radius . . . but if it does, take me there and there I’ll happily live!
Of the salt flats “down south” at 00:03:00, (Death Valley, the hottest place on Earth[x]) Dude chuckles “even a rattlesnake couldn’t get across em”. Is Dude referring to the reptile or to the memorable psychopath, Tommy Udo[xi], who he portrayed so effectively the year before Yellow Sky was releasedin Kiss of Death, (1947), almost stealing the film with his insane intensified chuckle – a chuckle he only slightly revives once (at 00:37:47) in Yellow Sky.
Eventually, in a town saloon, reviving themselves with a drink, the band encounter an extraordinary painting[xii]. A partly naïve, partly delirious, painting. Albert Pinkham Rider[xiii] crossed with Chagall[xiv]. Pale Death on a dark horse![xv]. This large image behind the bar fixates them all.
Lengthy (John Russell) whose awestruck lascivious comment at 00:03:57, harvests lust from the silence and then amusement: “I wonder if she’s got any plans after she gets through ridin’ that horse?” is reprised with more words but less universal staring at 00:05:29 – the camera closer to an image now about 50% larger. The statuesque woman appears to be tied to the rearing horse yet has the posture of someone reclining calmly on a sun lounger. The image is surreal and haunting – and perhaps intended to be subjective? Are the men all seeing it differently? She is not depicted as a victim. Does the horse represent the spirit of the woman? A woman as beyond the pale as Ellen Berent Harland (Gene Tierney) in Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Lengthy wouldn’t stand a chance!
“Yes sir, I sure would like to know what she plans to do after she gets through ridin’ that horse?” 00:05:29
The hold up (00:05:52) shoot up and escape is all over in less than a minute and by 00:07:52, chased by the cavalry out into a rocky wilderness among amazing tooth-shaped rocks towards the salt flats, they have lost their rear lookout rider. The cavalry captain calls a halt to the chase knowing the gang aren’t likely to survive crossing the sink of Death Valley: “Let ‘em go! Save us the trouble of hanging ‘em!”(00:08:30)
As Stretch divides the loot, the gang appear on the verge of fragmenting, though it’s hard to imagine they were ever a very cohesive unit. Dude, not caring personally about Jed being shot by the cavalry, is superstitiously fearful that the number of gang members no longer adds up to seven (00:09:21): “This desert’s a mighty unlucky place. A man needs all the odds he can get.” Several of them know it’s crazy not to turn back, “It’s a good 70 miles across this sink, maybe more!”, protests Lengthy, yet Stretch (at 00:09:38) asserts “it’s just a place, a place can be crossed.” At a horse walking speed of four miles an hour it would take 17 and a half hours to cover 70 miles. Wouldn’t travelling by night have been a good idea? Do most cinematic cowboys lack common sense? But since there is no shade to be had, maybe it’s better just to get going? In the end, even Dude, who was thinking of pulling back with the dark, follows Stretch and the gang out into the whiteout heat of the sink.
At minus 86 metres below sea level (or minus 282 feet) the Badwater Basin is one of the lowest places on earth as well as one of the hottest. As the band become dots in the whiteness, the scene conveys the idea that Stretch, like Captain Ahab (whose obssession with Moby Dick – the White Whale – Gregory Peck was to portray with festering intensity in 1956) is resolute and tenacious, yet also perhaps, recklessly self-destructive. At 00:12:16 the crazed crust of salt becomes soft and the horses begin to sink and stumble, obliging the men to walk. The film expertly gives an epic sense of this ordeal, of the heat and dessication, of wrong decisions – the folly of Walrus having filled his canteen with whiskey, the mistake of sleeping at night. To cut short a midnight fight between Walrus and Bull Run, when the former tries to drink from the latter’s water canteen, Stretch hurls a large chunk of salt at Walrus’s head (00:13:57). Stretch’s authority is no longer in doubt – as neither is his compassion the following day when he wets his horse’s mouth with valuable water from his canteen (00:15:15). This could be viewed as enlightened self-interest, except that he follows up by doing the same for Walrus’s horse. “Kinda noble, aren’t ya?” sneers Dude (00:15:45) to which Stretch replies “A horse’s a useful animal, no use letting him suffer just because he belongs to a jackass”. The hostility between the two men increases from here on, with Dude less ironically detached from the possibility of taking charge – although at this juncture, he appears to believe they are all doomed. When Lengthy shoots a lizard (00:16:31), basically for looking chipper and able to survive when he probably won’t. Half Pint (Henry Morgan) protests: “he wasn’t doing you no hurt”. The sink however, has no truck with compassion: it is Half Pint’s horse that soon collapses in sand dunes and has to be shot (00:18:19).
After almost ten minutes (a long time, especially in 1940s cinematic terms) at 00:18:47, Stretch, suspecting mirage, spots what appears to be salvation in the form of a distant town. Hope to cracked lips and dried out voices. They struggle on…to find the town of the title: Yellow Sky. A dehydrated ghost town. Dead. Crumpling up all over the steps of a collapsing saloon, the gang don’t have the energy or sense to even get out of the sun, resigned to becoming skeletons. Then there is the faint click of a rifle hammer being cocked. At 21 minutes, Mike (Anne Baxter, hilariously described in IMDb as a “gun toting tomboy”) at last appears:
Yellow Sky at 00:21.08 and the first appearance of ‘Mike’
If I could have it to myself – or better still, share it with Anne Baxter – Yellow Sky is another place I wouldn’t mind living. The rock formations around are superb and the dilapidation aesthetically surpasses Heysham and Morecambe, without people to complicate it![xvi]
In his wonderfully terse, two-minute recommendation of Yellow Sky[xvii], John Sayles may not overstate Anne Baxter’s impact but does exaggerate what she’s wearing: “tight jeans and a 50s bra that could put your eye out”. The high-contrast noir-etched photography of Baxter is stunning. Without doubt, apart from settings and landscapes, Baxter is the best thing about Yellow Sky, but although frowningly beautiful, its her spirit and character that most impress.
I’ve long had a thing about Anne Baxter, especially in earlier films such as Swamp Water[xviii] (1941) before fashion styled her hair in that increasingly fixed, bouffant power-perm manner which I can no longer bear to see because it unfailingly reminds me of the night and daymare that was Margaret Thatcher![xix] You can see this style creeping in by the time of another of my old screen favourites: 1958’s Chase a Crooked Shadow – although realistically, even in much earlier films, the secure Forties hairstyles aren’t so very different. Perhaps it is her wilder character in both Swamp Water and Yellow Sky that is so appealing?
Where matte[xx] shots are interposed into genuine landscape is often hard to tell when watching films in a relaxed way, but the solid ghost town of Yellow Sky, “fastest growing town in the territory” – its appearance and atmosphere – are entirely convincing. Apparently, the filmmakers reused and partly rebuilt or wrecked an old set known as “Last Outpost” in the Alabama Hills[xxi] just to the west of Lone Pine[xxii]. A hundred miles east, the salt flats and desert scenes were shot mostly in the Death Valley National Park[xxiii] with actors and crew staying at the evocatively named Furnace Creek.
Before the Thatcher-esque look of later years – a colorized, glammed-up publicity shot for Yellow Sky
At 00:21:54 Mike tells the exhausted gang where to find the spring “up behind those big rocks, at the head of the street”, suspiciously tracking them, rifle in hand. Later, at 00:23:47 she appears dominantly on a boulder above them, regretting their arrival, poised as they gulp and wallow in the pool.
It has often been repeated that Yellow Sky is loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest,[xxiv] and you can see certain obvious parallels: desert = sea, Stretch/Peck = Ferdinand, Grandpa = Prospero and Mike/Anne Baxter = Miranda . . . but if so, it’s a still looser adaptation than Forbidden Planet (1956), and Mike clearly has no wonderstruck admiration for Stretch: Miranda in Act 1, Scene 2 of The Tempest: “I might call him / A thing divine, for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble”.
If I had money for every film ‘loosely based’ on Shakespeare (the seventh art tirelessly in quest of respectability?) I would not be poor! In any case, the true value of Shakespeare, is the poetry, not the plots – most of which The Bard lifted from earlier sources. Once the description ‘loosely based’ is applied, most films would begin to resemble one (or several) of the seven – 36 basic plots[xxv] available. One might just as well say that Yellow Sky is ‘loosely based’ on the shipwreck of the Sea Venture off Bermuda in 1609[xxvi]!
No, Mike is not enraptured by this new humanity and if she were less defensive when the now hydrated Stretch first visits her house (00:24:25), could she have falsely conveyed that she was hiding nothing other than herself? With water, food and rest, the gang are bound to remember that weird painting in the saloon and revive their other animal instincts.
At 00:25:05, Mike tells Stretch that “it ‘aint far to Alkali, you could make it easy, if you try”. Alkali is a real place[xxvii] albeit a ghost town now[xxviii] in the inappropriately named Esmerelda County. Or perhaps the name only seems inappropriate because owing to one of those carelessly poetic lateral slips, it makes me think of emerald green grass . . . rather than sand, salt and emeralds[xxix]?
Nevada ghost town – Alkali Springs
I don’t want to venture into the political incorrectness of Stretch and his gang’s attitude towards the Apache[xxx] (though not only was Mike raised “with Apaches”, Grandpa praises them (00:26:11) as “fine people, if you can understand them”) or their lust or chivalry (the latter particularly in Bull Run’s case) regarding Mike/Constance Mae, or the necessity for a 1948 production to reinforce gender stereotypes for its mainstream coda (more on that later). Some of these attitudes are obviously toxic, some just amusingly or irritatingly of their time. Yes, it was inevitable that Mike and Stretch would ‘fall in love’ and probably both of them subconsciously feel this from the first moment they see each other – or so runs the timeless loathing-to-loving story convention, as well as the popular romantic notion. Mike tries to resist, whereas Stretch violently relaxes (!) into it, ceasing to sufficiently lead or control his gang and breaking his own rule to “stay away from those people!” (00:29:03). Eventually, stung by Mike telling him he smells bad (00:33:19), he even washes and shaves.
Mike with a smoothed-out Stretch!
Stretch looks much less appealing once shaved . . . but I’m getting ahead of myself and far ahead of the plot since it is Dude who dolls himself up first, just before Mike first comes to the spring for water (00:27:47). I hope she is going to boil that water before use after the mob has all slurped and wallowed in it! Or maybe, it’s just that I feel like washing after the battery of sexist comments and leering – all of which Mike takes in her stride. Of this and more violent scenes, no less than the BFI seems to have become over-compliantly politically correct[xxxi] proposing to demote a film made in 1948 for not having the worthwhile but somewhat idealised values of 2026. However enlightened we think we are 78 years later, such situations have not gone away. In watered-down fashion they happen in Heysham and Morecambe every day and my 16-year-old daughter prefers not to walk on the prom alone.
With dozens of wrecked buildings to choose from, why do the gang all “bunk down” in the saloon (00:29:50) – I’d chose a building as far away from the others as possible. The characters that “amount to nuthin’ nohow” (to quote Lengthy) seem able to sleep through Walrus snoring like a “wounded buffalo”, but Lengthy is driven outside – to find Stretch contemplating on the veranda of the ruined saloon. After needling Stretch about the whereabouts of Dude he goes back inside.
Is Stretch really looking for Dude, as he claims, when having moved towards the tenebrous homestead Mike emerges from the shadows to challenge him at 00:31:58? Tackling her by surprise, they fight, she head butts him, he does it back harder and forces a kiss on her, before desisting. This is where she tells him twice that he smells, and then taking careful aim, shoots him across the scalp (00:33:39). In another excellent post from 2008[xxxii], the writer highlights the scene which follows with Mike trying to explain to Grandpa why she shot Stretch:
“He made me feel . . . I don’t know.” But she does know. Stretch has made her feel like a woman for the first time in her life. Wellman then cuts to Mike’s room, in which a picture of an elegantly dressed lady is pinned onto her wall. Seeing it fills her with disgust and causes Mike to angrily tear it into pieces. It’s a great moment of self-loathing – she hates herself for feeling something that she’s been trying so hard to suppress. Although having such a picture on her wall in the first-place clues us into the fact that Mike longs to be as pretty as any other woman out there. In that one short scene, we sense Mike’s vulnerability for the first time.”
More specific than the tragic/Romantic pop songs that are a chart constant, the romances of old films still need last only half an hour or so of screen time – this is why they can be so haunting. Novels and tedious soaps and serials often do them to death. The best romance stories are about potential and hope, not dull, chronological reality. Being fundamentally frustrating, the human condition (in its customary form) cannot fulfil our yearnings for long – yet almost everyone who refuses to let the human state get them down, clings to hopes we project from imagination. Hence good love stories (and happy endings) have a general appeal even if many who have experienced the long-term reality of romantic love, try to reject such unreliable optimism. Romantic love may linger as familiarity and companionship, even flourish and create a sense of safety for decades, but are its deepest feelings of connection and joint projection, always liable to return to being about the other or the elsewhere? To a degree, this could be why I have abstracted my own deepest feelings into landscapes, atmospheres and the most searching art – which doesn’t mean that I can resist a wistful attraction to actresses[xxxiii] usually long dead. In great films none of the characters or landscapes are ever dead!
Bathing his scalp at the spring, Stretch encounters Dude. Could they have once been friends? Could they become friends? Not in Yellow Sky – this, distinctively, is one of its noir aspects. Stretch’s romantic inclinations have prevented him from deducing what Dude has had a hunch about all along – the presence of gold! Dude is greedy for gold and has no interest in romance. He tells Stretch his history and it’s the thought of his betraying ex-woman being made to suffer, that briefly revives Widmark’s insane chuckle from 1947’s Kiss of Death (00:37:47)[xxxiv]: “she lit out with a fella who ended up beating her”.
Above the ghost town the spring looks idyllic – as if the gang are enjoying a picnic. 00:26:57
From first encountering the Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin, as a teenager,the idea of the ghost town, or of ghost areas – such as the ex-lead-mining moors of Northumberland upon which we lived for seven years – may be even more fascinating than the allure of actresses who, while society survives, will never die. Ghost towns represent the flip side to potential, and up to a point, their history becomes fixed in time. Tyneham[xxxvi] in Dorset was one such place explored when we lived in the southwest of England. Appropriated as a training ground for D-Day in 1943, it was never returned to its inhabitants. Mardale in Cumbria[xxxvii] was another valley we knew well, though we never knew its villages, Mardale Green and Measand, only the reservoir which gradually drowned them from the late 1930s. By contrast, the ghost towns of the desert states of Nevada and California largely record a failure to survive at the periphery. Spelling out tales of greed, aspiration or over-ambition, they are gradually destroyed by extreme temperatures and the wind.
Shattered stable in a court of rocks. 00:41:09
Stretch makes no attempt to understand or appease Dude (00:38:16). The increased antagonism between them begins the central section, though at first, Stretch is more interested in smartening himself up. The gang meet to decide on a course of action having voted Dude as new leader (00:41:53). Stretch has no regard for democracy, but before a direct showdown, Mike takes the initiative from the boulders above – with her rifle. The existence of gold can no longer be doubted.
White flag or not, Mike has Stretch in the barrel of her gun – 00:45.09
This was probably not the first time such an idea was used in a film. Since the helical grooving[xxxviii] is clearly shown, was it actually shot through a larger diameter gun barrel or was this a special effect added in post-production?
If you have read this far without knowing Yellow Sky at all, I will leave all the nuances and twists of fate of the film’s second half to your imagination and jump to the perhaps unjustly despised coda which opens at 01:34:37. For long sections of its often nocturnal second half, Yellow Sky looks like a noir, but both the romantic elements and the reformation of Stretch to “James Dawson”, run counter to this. Stretch starts his biography by telling Mike and Grandpa (01:04:42) that “I come from good people. When I give my word, I mean it”.
Long prefaced by Grandpa’s compassion (01:08:02): “Guess the wars upset a lot of those boys and set them off on the wrong foot,” the coda is not just happy but quite comic and begins with the chagrined, contrite surviving bandits returning the stolen money to the bank. As if all crime could be so simply undone!
At 01:37:00 as the three survivors gallop across a beautiful flower-filled water-meadow for a rendezvous with Grandpa and Mike, the film reverts to its framing triumphalism and lightness. However, rather than the exploratory, adventurousness of the opening, the ending quickly becomes jubilant.
Do I want to be a woman some of the time? Can I do this? . . . 01:37:53
At 01:37:30 Stretch presents Mike with the hat bought from the head of an only temporarily affronted lady at the bank. This might all be “sappy” and “unbelievable”[xxxix], but personally, I enjoy it. Even if it was a studio imposition, it is a humorous, loving, throwaway thing, not worth getting wound up about[xl]. I don’t believe Mike will change because of it.
. . . Yes! At least for a while 01.38.00
Mike dares herself and accepts the hat. Love is in the air, let’s end quickly before the wedding!
[iii] In this outstanding piece by Stark Holborn, starkholborn.com/2020/01/23/review-yellow-sky- 1948/ he claims Yellow Sky as a precursor to the “Acid Western” sub-genre: “Acids, if you haven’t come across them before, are known, and named, for their counterculture tendencies; the desire to kick the western away from the glowy sunset of manifest destiny and into the dark corners of the soul.”
[iv] This article by Imogen Sara Smith brightlightsfilm.com/past-sunset-noir-in-the-west/ is so good on Bob Mitchum and others and on Pursued (1947), that I might abandon all future hopes of writing about that particular film!
[xii] I cannot find out who painted this. Presumably an artist employed by the film studio? If Sherlock Holmes were alive now, we need a monograph on bizarre portraits and paintings of old Hollywood A and B pictures – though I’m not sure it would be much help in the field of crime solving. When I’d almost reached the end of this essay, I encountered yet another wonderful post about Yellow Skyjeffarnoldswest.com/2022/03/yellow-sky-fox-1948-2/ which highlighted the similarities between the scene with the strange painting behind the bar and the opening of Wellman’s earlier film, The Ox-bow Incident (1943). The painting in Ox-Bow is not nearly so strange, but Henry Fonda’s comment “that guy’s awful slow getting’ there” sets off an interesting dialogue exchange.
[xviii] The first of Jean Renoir’s five films made in Hollywood during the Second World War was produced by 20th Century Fox. Categorised by the Nazis as “Cinematic Public Enemy Number One” Renoir’s left-wing anti-fascist and anti-war stance gave him no choice but to flee.
[xxix]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esmeralda_County,_Nevada “Esmeralda is the Spanish and Portuguese word for “emerald”. An early California miner from San Jose, James Manning Cory, named the Esmeralda Mining District after Esmeralda the Romani dancer from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.”
[xxx] Ibid, from Alex Good’s post: “At one point I was hoping for the return of the Apache at the end in the role of the cavalry, saving Stretch and Mike and Grandpa from Dude and the gang. That, however, would have been a turn of the screw too far in 1948.”
[xxxi]bfi.org.uk/lists/william-wellman-10-essential-films see also, reference xxxv below. It is notable that after Yellow Sky, Anne Baxter’s very next film, You’re My Everything (1949), a slight, cringy and often irritating musical drama, insidiously reinforces sexist attitudes as well as racism – Dan Dailey even blacking up for one film-within-the-film. Rightly unacceptable now, this was standard at the time. Unlike the constant threat of the lustful men (a gang of criminal roaming men would be no different nowadays) towards Mike in Yellow Sky, this casual racism is not intrinsic to the contrast, tension or plot. An amusing aspect of You’re My Everything however, are the silent film take-offs – one entitled Flaming Flappers – acted out in believable, satirical fashion by Baxter, whose character is supposedly “patterned” on Clara Bow. She is certainly utterly different to Mike!
[xxxv]The Ruin, lines 8-13, translation by Michael Alexander, from The Earliest English Poems, Penguin Classics, first published in 1966, is thought likely to be about Aquae Sulis (Bath).
[xxxix] In his splendidly terse, to-the-point, two-minute recommendation of Yellow Sky, John Sayles hates its possibly studio-required end: youtube.com/watch?v=SrbtgJTe6ok saying at 00:01:36 “If I ruled the world, I’d cut the sappy, unbelievable coda off the movie!” But I often like abrupt happy endings, unless they are so bad they make you nauseous. They can be less tiring. I always feel tempted to rewrite bad endings. Every time I watch Out of the Past (1947), for example, I always want Bob Mitchum to survive even though that would defy one of the rules I consider essential to true noir – a tragic conclusion.
In William A. Wellman: 10 essential filmswww.bfi.org.uk/lists/william-wellman-10-essential-films the BFI also finds fault with the cheerful ending (and other things): “Were it not for some alarmingly dodgy sexual politics – from Gregory Peck’s assault on Anne Baxter to her final acquiescence (via a bonnet) to his idea of feminine norms – Yellow Sky might rank among Wellman’s best.” I fail to see why depicting things how they simply would have been, counts as “alarmingly dodgy sexual politics”. That is to apply modern attitudes to a film made 78 years ago. The hat incident may or may not have been a studio imposition, but it is a humorous, loving, throwaway thing, neurotic to be wound up about, and absurd that it should affect how we rank the film. We can deplore aspects of the past, but we can’t expect the past to fit in with our current fashions. Personally, I don’t believe Mike/Constance Mae will change all that much because of a silly hat and both Stretch and I would be disappointed if she did. But that’s why films end when they do. In ‘real life’ we are often likely to be disappointed. One of the major problems with long-form TV is that it never ends but merely staggers on into the desert.
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has beenan artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of home-made film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has been an artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
Devonshire
Staggering amidst a floodtide Heavitree
of happiness embalmed in memory sudden frost children
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has beenan artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of home-made film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
ROSS COGAN studied philosophy, gaining a Ph.D. He has published three poetry collections, Stalin’s Desk (2005) and The Book I Never Wrote (2012), with Oversteps, and Bragr (2018) with Seren. Ross received a Gregory Award in 1999, and has won the Exeter, Frogmore, Cannon Sonnet and Staple prizes, and been placed in others including second in the Troubadour. His poetry has been published in the Guardian, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry London, PN Review, New Welsh Review, Rialto, Acumen, Stand, Orbis and other magazines. A writer and editor, he was Creative Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival from 2010 to 2019
The world as will and idea
“L’histoire conte que le terrible Schopenhauer en était fort amateur de bière. Il jouait aussi de la clarinette, mais c’était peut-être pour embêter ses voisins.” (Jean Verdenal)
Schopenhauer, we’re told, had a great love
of beer. The man who let his mind
slip slyly under the stage curtain, behind
the painted backdrop of ideas,
to where the great undifferentiated ‘all’,
hungry and fierce and cruel,
pulls the levers and unties the ropes
from in the shadows that it also is;
the man who walked at night down certain half-
deserted streets to stand alone in
the blasted wasteland where the grim
indifferent wind whirls and one feels the frozen
hub of the world’s fever; this man
was not above
quenching his resulting thirst
in a long, cool glass of beer.
I like to picture him in a neat,
dark frockcoat, buttoned high,
a crisp, cambric shirt, a sumptuous tie,
surmounted by a simple pin,
reclining in a corner seat
in a favourite bierkeller, his face a lion’s, his thin
ROSS COGAN studied philosophy, gaining a Ph.D. He has published three poetry collections, Stalin’s Desk (2005) and The Book I Never Wrote (2012), with Oversteps, and Bragr (2018) with Seren. Ross received a Gregory Award in 1999, and has won the Exeter, Frogmore, Cannon Sonnet and Staple prizes, and been placed in others including second in the Troubadour. His poetry has been published in the Guardian, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry London, PN Review, New Welsh Review, Rialto, Acumen, Stand, Orbis and other magazines. A writer and editor, he was Creative Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival from 2010 to 2019
LOUIS HUNT is a retired professor of political theory. He has published poems and translations from Sanskrit and Classical Tibetan in a variety of online and print journals including Metamorphoses, The Brazen Head, Interpret, The High Window, New Verse Review and Nimrod.
The poem numbers refer to Per K Sorensen’s critical edition: Divinity Secularized: An Inquiry into the Nature and Form of the Songs Ascribed to the Sixth Dalai Lama, Wien 1990. Translated from the Tibetan by Louis Hunt
The Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama is a collection of 65 poems popularly ascribed to the Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso (1683-1706). The Sixth Dalai Lama was notorious for his indifference to the religious and political obligations of his office. He publicly renounced his monastic vows, preferring to spend his time in the taverns and brothels of Lhasa. He died at the age of 26, taken hostage and presumably killed by the Mongol forces contending for power in central Tibet. Despite his notoriously unconventional behavior, the Sixth Dalai Lama is a revered figure in Tibetan culture. Some have tried to interpret his lack of the conventional monastic virtues of celibacy and abstinence as an example of Tantric Buddhism in which the deliberate flaunting of moral norms is seen as a dangerous but potentially more efficacious route to Enlightenment. But the poems themselves suggest a simpler explanation – Tsangyang Gyatso was an ardent young man chafing at the restraints of familial, religious, and political authority.
The poems themselves are quite short – four lines of six syllables a piece, almost haiku like in their brevity. But the condensed style of classical Tibetan literature, the tendency, especially in poetry, to omit grammatical particles whenever possible, means that one can pack a lot of meaning into a very small compass. Despite their apparent simplicity, these poems can often be read as an indirect commentary on the difficulties of Tsangyang Gyatso’s precarious position in Lhasa. The “grey-yellow” wind that banishes “the blossom from the bee” is also an allusion to the color of the robes worn by Tibetan government officials. The poems touch as well on specific aspects of Tibetan Buddhism that may not be familiar to the uninitiated reader. For example, the image of the girl returning “again and again in my thoughts” uses the Tibetan expression for the Buddhist conception of cyclic existence. But I believe these poems work, or should work, even for someone completely unfamiliar with Tibetan history or Tibetan Buddhist practice. I have endeavored to translate these poems in a way that conveys the only thing that can be adequately represented in English – their lucid surface.
LOUIS HUNT is a retired professor of political theory. He has published poems and translations from Sanskrit and Classical Tibetan in a variety of online and print journals including Metamorphoses, The Brazen Head, Interpret, The High Window, New Verse Review and Nimrod
MATTHEW KIRBY’s poems have appeared in various periodicals, recently, Tar River Poetry,New Verse Review, Little Patuxent Review, Doubly Mad, and Literary Matters. He lives in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley with his wife and kids.
The Property
Jay’d had a few when he’d decided, true.
A trip out to the property he owned
but never stood or laid eyes on. The title
noted a lien and other complications.
A former easement had been covered by
the snows of time. Now inaccessible
by road, the land lay feral, swallowed up
by taxes, eglantine, and pine. The real
draw was his dad was, maybe, buried there
beside a boat shed on the dried up pond.
He changed his filters, packed his saddle bags
with Enid’s sourdough bread and beer
and went, despite the ice that week, into
a kind of heaven, all brown and white and raw.
Cardinal Salute
Direct my spirit north, to mining towns,
cold air descending from the foot of heaven,
to hemlocks stunted by the breath of God,
mud springs, slate caves and state park dirt bike trails,
a peeling porch, a girl in a gray bandana,
descendent of all races, fathered by
a machinist, though he was ordained in Lviv,
keeps up a fleet of Belarusian bikes
and rents them to a few vacationers.
Of late, his daughter’s helping him expand
through marketing consisting of exquisite
daguerreotypes, hand-colored, of her boyfriend
riding a two-stroke Minsk enduro bike
through granite-flanked ravines, past bobbing ferns.
He Didn’t Understand the Reason Why
He didn’t understand the reason why
they fired his wife, but he was kind of glad
and welcomed her back home with soft-boiled eggs
and oat milk lattes on the patio.
He told her two could live as cheap as one
and sex was better in the afternoon.
She mourned her sense of purpose for a time.
She ran and lost ten pounds and planted hostas
in each square foot of shade. She talked to birds,
really conversed with them about their edgy,
cantankerous chirps and status-conscious preening.
MATTHEW KIRBY’s poems have appeared in various periodicals, recently, Tar River Poetry,New Verse Review, Little Patuxent Review, Doubly Mad, and Literary Matters. He lives in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley with his wife and kids.
The first in a series of stories from Bin Ends by X. Trapnel, Anthony Powell’s great lost novelist, as found and transcribed by NICK BOOTH
Billy the Tie told me to go and fetch Lavender Ray’s suitcase. ‘Do us a favour,’ he’d said. ‘There’s something in it which will get us all into trouble.’ I’d a hard-edged hangover of the type where you’re not sure of your stomach or your sanity. It was not long after opening time at the Black Dog and I’d just accepted from Billy a verbal promissory note of a tin of fags to be collected that afternoon. He was apt to make gifts and all of us who lived on the straight side of the fence knew not to accept them as a rule. However, the Blitz was on and there were bombs night and day. For most people life was difficult, but Billy had come into easy street: thieving and fiddling in the blackout was, as he put it, ‘extra-easy’. Soho talk had it that Billy had even done people in but the prospect of having a lot of cigarettes to play with was too much in my weakened condition so I gave in. ‘You’ll have fags galore, boy,’ he’d said.
I had not expected a favour to be called in so quickly. My stomach knotted tighter into a ball of acid. The pain in my head flared. The stale beer-and-fags morning scent of the Black Dog, usually rather enjoyable, oppressed me. Gingerly I drank a farty half of Bass. I noticed my hand was shaking slightly. The fear, sadness and regret of the serious hangover bit deep. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ said Billy.
I said I didn’t mind, of course I didn’t mind. On the contrary, it would be a pleasure, I said.
‘I shouldn’t think it’ll be a pleasure,’ said Vernie wryly. Vernie was Billy’s sidekick. Tall where Billy was slightly under. Both wore pinstripe suits (Billy’s smart dress sense was the reason for his nickname). It seemed their ambition was to look like the cream of society instead of rats: the tribute vice pays to virtue. However, the effect was more suggestive of a variety double-act. Vernie took an ostentatious sip at his double pimple and water, to show off he was drinking one. Pimple-and-blotch: scotch.
‘Come on now, Bill,’ said the landlady, Ada. ‘Neville’s a painter. He’s not part of all your lot.’
‘Ain’t you in the war effort, boy?’ asked Vernie in way that was avuncular yet sinister. I said I was waiting to be called up. That was a lie. I’d been deemed unfit for service.
‘Never mind all that plop,’ said Billy, his voice as coarse as a burglar’s file. ‘You go and fetch me Lavender Ray’s suitcase.’
‘What’s in the suitcase,’ asked a little fish-faced man they called Cod’s Eyes who pushed sack barrows about for his living. ‘It ain’t that tart’s head, is it?’
‘Cheese it,’ said Billy. He fixed me with his blue eyes, cold as winter dusk. ‘It’s easy as wink,’ he said.
‘Is Ray dead, then?’ asked Vernie disinterestedly.
‘Word come to me last night that he’s dying, at death’s door. His landlady had the doctor out to him – who paid I don’t know: Ray’d never cough up for a doctor anyway. ‘Ere Vernie, “cough up”. Did you hear that? Well laugh, then. Tops up the quack says it ain’t no good. Ray’s finished. Lungs or summink.’
I felt finished too, and hurried to the gents where I was violently ill. Why had I agreed to the errand? When I came back I drank off my Bass, cross-eyed for a moment watching the brown river of beer flow into my mouth while Billy wrote Lavender Ray’s address on a strip of the Greyhound Express. ‘There’s a key on a bit of string in the letterbox of the street door. His room’s at the top of the house. There’s two doors on the landing. Ray’s is the first one. Don’t sod about. Bring the suitcase back here,’ he said softly. ‘If I’m not here and neither is Vernie, just wait till we are. On no account leave the suitcase here or anywhere else, got it. That tin of fags will be waiting.’
‘Tart’s head?’ asked Ada rhetorically.
‘Some dead tart was found,’ said Cod’s Eyes. ‘I see it in the paper.’
‘Why would her head be in Lavender Ray’s suitcase,’ said Vernie.
‘Cheese it, will you,’ said Billy. ‘You’ll go frightening the boy here. Now, you run along and them fags is all yours.’
I turned out of the door of the Dog. It closed slowly. I heard Vernie say, ‘You’ve sent a boy on a man’s job there. Look at the state of him. I bet the army told him to fog off.’ There was general laughter. ‘I bet,’ added Vernie, ‘they said come back next year when you’ve got some hair on your chest.’ There was more laughter.
*
Outside I took a deep breath, which didn’t help. Cod’s Eyes came out of the other door and walked over to me. He was grinning. ‘You’ve got that all round yer neck, intcha. Why d’yer do it?’
‘I wanted the fags. I didn’t think – ’
‘You didn’t think,’ interrupted Cod’s Eyes elongating the words with a contemptuous tone. ‘You know, you don’t half look queer.’
‘I feel queer.’
‘Want a fag?’
We lit up Cod’s Eyes’s Players. ‘There could be anything in that suitcase,’ he said. ‘Might be a shooter. There was a bloke shot in the West India Dock Road the other night, right through the heart. Foul murder. If the gun’s in that case you’ll be an accessory, kid. Enough to put a rope round your neck.’ He paused and looked at me searchingly through his murky protuberant eyes. Any friendliness vanished. ‘You mug,’ he said. He chipped his fag and stuck back in its box. ‘Stick to drawing pictures next time.’
He started off across the road but quickly turned back and said: ‘How you make a living doing that?’
‘Once in a while someone buys one,’ I said. My voice sounded forlorn. Cod’s Eyes walked on then turned round once more and yelled: ‘If that’s tart’s head’s in it, you’ll swing for that an’ all.’ Then he seemed to remember he was shouting Billy the Tie’s business in the street. He looked round fearfully and stalked away.
I walked out of Soho feeling weak at the knees. Then I got the Tube east.
*
I emerged not far from the river. The whole district had really copped it in the raids. I entertained a wild hope that Lavender Ray’s lodgings had been bombed flat.
The streets were full of dust. Kids searched for shrapnel and looked well pleased at the new anarchy of war. A broken-down bus was pulled up round one corner. Its driver was sitting on seats at the back. Somehow he had got a mug of tea. As I passed he raised the chipped vessel in an ironic toast and winked. In the distance I could hear falling bricks and the sound of a lot of broken glass being swept. I walked for a few minutes and asked the way more than once. At last I came to an old street with a factory wall on one side and tall knocked-about houses on the other. Outside one a woman with a beaky nose in a housecoat was smoking a cigarette and watching another woman in a hairnet scrub the front step. ‘Raymond?’ she said in answer to my query. ‘Next house, top floor. I hope you ain’t going that way, sonny.’
The woman wearing the hairnet craned her head round from the step. She looked chinny and pompous. ‘We don’t want all that round here,’ she said. I walked on. I heard the woman with the beaky nose say, ‘Ought to be in the bloody army.’
I climbed three steps to Ray’s lodgings and felt in the letterbox for the key on a bit of string. It was there. I turned the key and pushed at the door, which seemed stuck. ‘You have to give it a shove when it’s hot,’ said the woman in the hairnet. She’d come down the street to look at me. ‘Push it, boy. Ain’t you got no strength?’
I duly pushed harder. The door, which was rough and splintered at the bottom from untold coaxing kicks, swung open. A vague smell of cooking and fags came out like a silent belch. My crapulent stomach turned a little. Everything inside was brown: tea brown walls, gravy brown stairs, brown windsor lino. I started up the stairs. The ancient stair-carpet was a dirty old brown. An archaeologist might have found a pattern in it. Each landing was the same brown study but a little smaller each time. All was silent but for the sound of a wireless behind one of the doors playing cheery light music. I looked out of a window and saw a brick wall with a yard below. Some washing was pegged out by a privy. The top staircase wound up to a small landing.
I raised my hand to knock but hesitated. Leave now, I thought. Run. I would, I thought, have to avoid Soho thereafter but even going to ground would not protect me from Billy the Tie if I welshed our arrangement. It was folly to think otherwise. You’re in it now, I thought. I’d a lousy headache and felt sweat on my temples. My stomach seemed to have fallen away like so much bombed brickwork. I knocked. Nothing stirred behind the door. I knocked again. Then the other door opened and a tiny old man in a crumpled too-big suit and a soup-strainer moustache appeared. ‘He’s dead,’ he said. ‘If you’re here to thieve, I doubt there’s any money in there. I expect the quack had all that last night. Mug if he didn’t.’ The old man’s voice was like a hinge in need of oil. ‘Got a fag?’
I shook my head, knocked again and then went in.
It was a tiny servant’s room in which everything seemed grey. Behind a menthol atmosphere there was a vague unpleasant smell. The covers were pulled over a body on the bed. A suit hung on the front of a tallboy. The suitcase stood by the bed. In keeping with the hallways it was brown, with leather corners. I lifted it an inch, then put it down. It was heavyish. ‘Any booze?’ said the little man with the moustache. He was hovering on the threshold. I told him there wasn’t any. At this, the corpse’s hand appeared from under the bedclothes and snatched away the covers. A bony face was revealed. I jumped back. My heart was going like a jazz set. ‘I’m not blinking dead – yet,’ rasped Ray. ‘I was shamming ‘cos I thought you were – ’ He stopped. What little colour that had been in his face drained away. He closed his eyes. I looked out at the old man on the landing, who drew his finger across his throat and sadly shook his head. Ray opened his eyes again. ‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘What you want that suitcase for?’
‘Billy sent me for it,’ I said. ‘Billy the Tie.’ Ray looked furious.
‘You tell Billy to …’ He raised his head to spit out the last words but now it fell back. Ray closed his eyes and opened them. ‘ . . . to mind his own business.’ He seemed to have fallen asleep or have passed out, or died. I looked at my watch. Of course, it had stopped.
‘Don’t sod about,’ I remembered Billy saying. I picked up the suitcase. I noticed there was in fact some booze: half a bottle of scotch on the washstand. I decided not to inform the old man of its existence. On the landing he stood back for me to pass. His eyes were wild. ‘You thieving that suitcase, boy?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m to take it to its owner.’ I started down the stairs. The old boy leant over the banisters and yelled, ‘You’re a tea-leaf!’
I’d done myself no good saying I was taking the suitcase to its owner when its owner was dying in bed upstairs. It was at this point I began to see a courtroom, a trial, a judge, indeed a judge with the black cap on . . . ‘But you took the suitcase,’ the judge said with an echo. ‘You are implicated in a capital offence, my boy.’ He was old; he looked rather like Lavender Ray.
‘You’re a bloody tea-leaf!’ yelled the old man again.
I careered down the stairs and out of the front door. The two women watched me go past. The beaky one said, ‘Where you get that suitcase?’
A window opened above. It was the old boy again bawling through his soup-strainer. ‘Stop thief!’ his whingeing voice cried. I sped up and looked behind me. The two women were chasing me. I wanted to stop and argue but my credentials were hardly convincing.
Now I was in a sort of comedic silent film chase. Up a street and down a street – up a ladder, down a snake, I’d thought – with the two women chasing me. I lost my bearings. Now, I thought, the police will be looking for a young man with a suitcase.
I turned a corner and the broken-down bus was going again. I caught the driver’s eye and, trying to sound calm, asked him where he was going. ‘Central. Jump on chum, if you’re going that way. I’m heading towards Tower Hill.’ I said I’d enjoy the view and so went upstairs. God knows what had happened to the conductor. I looked back at the street corner. At any moment the two harridans would come storming round it shouting the odds. The driver was revving the engine, as if to make sure the bus had the guts to last out the journey. Finally it lurched forward. I kept my eyes back on the corner, but no one came round it. My attention switched to the suitcase. It smelt vile.
*
The hangover had reached a weary late stage. It would quietly stop soon. My head felt old, sore, wooden. I had that woeful inner climate that interprets the sight of a scrap of newspaper blowing down the street as a powerful symbol of the futility and transience of life. On top of that, the suitcase was now a stinky reminder of my foolishness in accepting Billy the Tie’s promise of fags. Then I thought how much I’d like a fag now. I fought back against fear by reminding myself that I’d simply done someone a favour. ‘How was I to know there was the head of a corpse in it,’ I said to the Old Bailey of the mind. The judge spoke again: ‘Do you expect this court to believe you did not know who Billy the Tie was? You, a denizen of Soho pubs, a familiar face? Boozing your days away when better men are fighting for their country?’ Meanwhile, the bad smell came in waves from Lavender Ray’s suitcase. I counted barrage balloons to take my mind off it.
I got off just before the bus terminated at Tower Hill and thanked the driver, who said watch out for Jerry. ‘The Nazzies will have this city to rubble if we’re not careful.’
‘That’s conchie talk,’ I said jokingly. Conchie talk, yes, I thought, like me imagining that picking this old suitcase up could land me in the slammer. But then fearfully I slipped back to thinking of ways that it could.
I walked slowly through the city. By the time I was in Cheapside I was craving a fag. It was a fine day, and for some reason I fell to thinking how wonderful it would be if there wasn’t a war on and if I hadn’t got to lug this suitcase across town. I bought a single fag from a miserly tobacconist who wanted a penny for it and sat down by St Paul’s churchyard to smoke and think. The suitcase stood in front of me. I stared down at it. It didn’t smell so bad in the open air. Should I open it? Should I not? After a while I was lost in thought, staring at the shops in front of me. The courtroom, the judge, the old boy with a soup-strainer, Lavender Ray, Billy the Tie, Vernie, Ada, Cod’s Eyes, they all appeared in my mind. Fear rose in me. Great fear. Then two things happened in short order: I heard the air raid siren start up, that queer bellowing whine, the siren call of a sea monster I’d called it in a poem I hadn’t finished – and someone pinched the suitcase and ran off.
*
The thief was short and wore a cloth cap. I ran after him. I was shouting but pedestrians were coming out of shops and offices and hurrying to shelters. They took no notice of this youngster shouting over the siren. Soon enough I was gaining on him and at the bottom of Ludgate Hill I ran him into a wall via a sort of rugby tackle. ‘All right, all right!’ he shouted. He was in his forties by the look, and now had a rip in his trousers. ‘I thought you was finished with it,’ he said angrily. ‘I mean I didn’t think it was yours: I had one just like that pinched off me yesterday; I bin looking for it ever since.’ I was dusting myself down and listening for bombers.
‘Oh really,’ I said sarcastically.
‘Don’t call in the law,’ he said as he got up. His anger melted away to a pleading appearance. He looked tired, thin and crumpled. Small intelligent brown eyes, rather dog-like, watched me carefully.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t,’ I said. He brightened up at this. Now we were just two people passing the time of day in an air raid.
‘What’s in it?’ he said.
I swore as I picked the suitcase up to walk on. ‘What’s it got to do with you,’ I said. ‘You’re a tea-leaf,’ I said, remembering the old boy’s jibe.
‘I just like to know what I’ve missed out on.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I don’t actually know.’
‘Wot!’ he said. He was walking beside me now. I was thinking how stupid I’d been to chase him. Providence had stepped in to my problems; a veritable deus ex machina had dropped from the sky instead of a bomb and now I was saddled with the suitcase again. Mind you, would Billy have accepted that I’d had the case pinched off me? I gave the thief the gist, shouting above the sound of bomb crumps coming from near the river. ‘I’d open that up if I was you,’ he said. I kept on walking. ‘If you don’t want what’s inside, I’ll have it off you.’ I kept on walking.
‘You can tell your mate who sent you that you lost the case in the air raid.’
‘Yeah,’ I said without turning to look at him, ‘and then get razored in an alley.’ But I knew he was right. I felt sweat running down my temples. I knew I couldn’t take that suitcase back to Soho without looking in it and I knew I had to get away from the thief before he had another go at taking it. Now I started to run and he was chasing me.
We were near the river, in an alley at the bottom of some steps when I tripped and fell. The suitcase skidded ahead. The thief dashed past me and picked it up. I yelled at him to open it. ‘What – and finders keepers,’ he said. I grunted agreement. Breathing heavily he squatted and flicked up the suitcase clips. He lifted the lid. I walked over rubbing my throbbing knee. He stared at the open case and rolled his eyes. ‘Gor christ,’ he said. ‘The stink!’
In Lavender Ray’s suitcase was an assortment of meat and a chicken, all going rotten. The thief grinned. ‘They won’t ‘ang you for that,’ he said and walked off. The crumps in the distance had stopped.
I closed the case and carried on walking slowly back to Soho. The hangover, like the air raid, was fading out.
*
‘Well done,’ said Billy the Tie. We were in the yard behind the Black Dog, which had just opened for the evening. He placed the suitcase on a dustbin, opened it and grimaced at the smell. He tipped the rotten meat into another dustbin then he reached into the suitcase, released a catch and pulled out a section of lining. It was a false-bottomed suitcase. He took out an envelope and from this he drew a wad of money. More banknotes than I’d ever seen. There were big five-pound notes, pink and mauve one-pound notes and even ten-shilling notes. He tucked the money back in the envelope without counting it and stowed it in the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket.
The thief had let a great prize go. ‘You haven’t seen any of this have you, boy,’ said Billy without so much as looking at me. I agreed I had not. He threw the suitcase over the wall into an area where barrows were kept overnight. We walked back to the public bar. Business seemed concluded so far as he was concerned. Vernie, leaning on the bar, took a cigarette from a silver case and lit it, eyeing me. ‘That boy looks like he’s sickening for something,’ he said. Billy had a sly smile but then he saw Ada looking indignant on my behalf. ‘Oh yes,’ said Billy. From a voluminous pocket he produced a tin of fags. I took them, almost snatched them, with no thought of law, of coppers, of courts, nor of judges. I looked down at the lid: CRAVEN PLAIN. I felt sad and a little ashamed. Ada gestured to me and I followed her to the other end of the bar. ‘I hope you’ve learned to stay away from them lot,’ she said in a fierce whisper. ‘Join the bloody army too while you’re at it. It’s an honester life than this.’
‘All right, Ada. Give us a Bass please,’ I said. I hugged the cigarette tin. I opened it. It was full. I sniffed the toasty aroma of fresh cut fags. Good old Billy I even thought.
I was about two mouthfuls in to the Bass, which was less farty than the morning’s, when the door opened behind me. ‘Where’s my bloody suitcase,’ yelled a cracked voice. It was Lavender Ray. Lavender Ray bold as brass, as Cod’s Eyes would always say when telling the story.
Vernie laughed. Ray was in the suit that had been hanging on the tallboy and was in a rage. ‘I been burgled,’ he shouted. The smattering of early-doors drinkers turned to look. A naval officer who’d strayed into the public bar looked very disapproving, as if he’d trodden in a dog turd.
‘Calm down, Ray,’ said Billy. ‘You look rough. Cheese it.’
‘You’re supposed to be dead,’ said Vernie affably.
‘Dead drunk more like,’ said Billy. But he looked wary.
‘Dead? I bloody ought to be. I got up,’ said Ray, ‘I drank half a bottle of pimple and I come down here for my suitcase.’
‘Too bad about that suitcase, Ray,’ said Billy carefully. ‘We thought you wouldn’t be needing it like, and well, you’d rather your money went to a good cause and not the policeman’s ball, wouldn’t you.’
There was a tremendous scene at this. Ray said he hadn’t made a will and if he had Billy and Vernie would not be in it. Then he sprang at Billy yelling something about his tie which he savagely tightened to throttle Billy. It was a neat schoolboy trick here executed with demonic brio. Ray might have been at death’s door but he seemed as strong as a lion. Billy was choking when Ray delivered an uppercut that sent him sprawling into the fireplace, which was unlit. Vernie was next, taking a series of punches that left both his nostrils pouring blood over his greasy little pencil moustache. It all happened very quickly. Perhaps Ray had been a boxer. Ada was shouting; two drinkers, market sorts, grabbed at Ray. The naval officer kept saying someone should get a constable. No one took any notice of him. Billy got to his feet, loosened his tie, gasped a few times and gave Ray the envelope he’d taken from the suitcase. No fuss, no whining. The market sorts let go of Ray. Ray opened the envelope and gave its contents a brief look. Turning to leave he caught sight of me. His waxy nostrils flared. ‘The thief,’ he snarled and dragged me outside in an unbreakable grip. I was quite distressed to note that no one tried to stop him.
With whisky breath he harangued me. His face was alarmingly grey and he was slightly boss-eyed with drink. Passers-by looked at us as if we were both undesirables, which I suppose we were. I knew a punch was coming. Right in the kisser Vernie would have said. Maybe a lot of punches were coming. ‘So you think you can burgle my home, do yer! How dare you even think you can steal from a sick man!’ He interspersed each sentence with obscenities and swearwords. I realised that Billy had sent me into a lion’s den to steal, plain and simple thieving, and I’d done it in sweet ignorance: this man was so tough even Billy the Tie was scared of him.
Ray clenched his fist so I gabbled out an apology that did not make a great deal of sense and then I thrust the tin of fags at him by way of a gift (I’d held on to them like grim death). This stopped him. He took the tin of Craven Plain. He looked at it with surprise and something like appreciation. He looked at me. Then he punched me just the same. It felt like a cricket bat had walloped my mouth. I saw stars and tottered into a lamppost on which I steadied myself. I could taste blood. Ray opened the tin and extracted a fag from the tightly packed multitude therein. I was prevailed upon to light it for him. He drew on the fag. This triggered a ghastly coughing fit: he coughed with his head on one side, then on the other. He doubled over to cough. He expectorated violently on to the pavement. He pushed one nostril in and blew battleship grey and sea green snot out of the other. He wheezed horribly: his lungs were an old cracked squeeze-box. He coughed again horribly; he coughed lustily; he giggle-coughed; he guffaw-coughed. He coughed like an angry retort and then like a belch. His eyes watered profusely. He spat again. He turned light green. Then he took another long draw on the fag and walked off. Word came the next day that he was dead. I wondered if the old boy with the soup-strainer moustache thieved my tin of fags when Billy expired. I don’t know who got the money from the suitcase.
*
Billy the Tie hanged himself in 1944. Some said over underworld debt. Vernie also died in the war: choked to death on a black market pickled onion in an army camp somewhere. He was drunk at the time. Ada perished when the Black Dog copped it from a doodlebug. Cod’s Eyes fell in the Thames one night after closing time and drowned. Late in the war I remembered the inside of Lavender Ray’s suitcase when the thief opened it down by the river. I did a painting of an opened suitcase on a bomb-site with a living bird in it. It was exhibited in a West End gallery. A newspaper critic said it was the human spirit coming back after the cataclysm; something like that. I expect it’ll end up in the Tate.
LUKE GILFEDDER describes the characters and places of Eric Tucker, Warrington’s ‘Secret Lowry’
The best half-dozen artists of any nation, Wyndham Lewis remarked, are never dependent on the objective world for their success or stimulus; they can make a new thing of anything, however provincial the original. This proved particularly apt for Eric Tucker, who had not even Rembrandt’s country mills and Dutch canals to draw on, but instead the factories, pubs and angry red-brick streets of Warrington — officially Britain’s ‘worst town for culture’, according to the Royal Society of Arts.
Yet despite its lack of vibrant cycle paths, world-class heritage sites and inclusive street furniture, the old Wire Town still inspired Tucker to create a prodigious body of work. He left behind some five hundred paintings, concealed throughout his end-of-terrace home: stashed on top of and behind wardrobes, hidden in a stairwell cupboard and the garden shed, and even stuffed into empty compost bags in the remains of an old air-raid shelter. Shortly after he died in 2018, his family turned his home into a gallery for a weekend – dubbed a “terraced-house Tate” in his nephew Joe Tucker’s book, The Secret Painter – and more than two thousand locals attended. National press coverage, museum retrospectives and West End exhibitions followed, sealing Tucker’s reputation as Warrington’s ‘Secret Lowry’.
But does this comparison hold? Tucker was certainly a fan of Lowry, but among his art books, he apparently had only one on the Manchester painter. For the most part, his collection consisted of works on early Modern artists, predominantly Post-Impressionists: Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. But the Art World has an unfortunate habit, when it belatedly discovers Northern artists, of yoking them all to Lowry. See here: another Gulley Jimson of the North, dimly emerging from Lancashire’s mephitic glooms, a reclusive eccentric whose voice has been heard only too late…
Lowry spent eighty-eight years in Manchester polishing this fantasy about himself: the myth, as Brian Sewell put it, that he sprang fully formed from the brow of Minerva and painted more or less the same picture of urban dereliction eight hundred times after a Pauline revelation in a Pendleton park. His converting angel said, “Look,” and, looking, Lowry saw that grime was good. Yet compared with Tucker, Lowry was relatively middle-class. He grew up in the leafy suburb of Victoria Park. In photographs, he appears a formal, distant, clerkly figure. Tucker, while also a lifelong bachelor who lived with his mother, had been a boxer, labourer and gravedigger — by all accounts a private yet popular character who modelled his shtick more on Ken Dodd than the Douanier Rousseau. Where Lowry painted as an outsider looking in, Tucker painted as an insider looking out. “Eric is one of the people in the pictures,” his brother explained to art historian Ruth Millington. “He knows them all.”
This distinction is writ large on the walls of a recent Mayfair retrospective, Characters and Places. Tucker gives us industrial life up close: there are no long-shot vistas of market squares and factory gates, no matchstick men pouring from blackened mills — Lowry’s “undignified, pea-brained homunculi”, as Edwin Mullins termed them. Tucker’s characters are rounded in every sense: ruddy-cheeked, individual, full of vim and vigour. You wish you were having as good a time as his pubgoers. Each subject is rendered not in Lowry’s muted palette but in ham pinks, russets, ochres and blacks. Flat-capped pipe smokers and their grizzled ale-mates jostle with young couples and cabaret singers amid crisply defined bottles and glasses. There are no gloomy kitchen-sink shenanigans here: Tucker’s oils and watercolours transform Warrington’s nightlife into something as joyfully carnivalesque — though less coldly abstract — as Wyndham Lewis’s drawings of Breton peasant fêtes.
Lowry may have convinced Tucker that life in the industrial north was worthy of painting, but Tucker shows what Lowry missed in it. This is as true of Tucker’s ‘places’ as of his characters. Beyond the smoky pubs and clubs, Tucker depicts vignettes from Warrington’s backstreets and alleyways, peopled with half-spectral figures playing games, lighting bonfires, dealing scrap, or simply smoking a cigarette and staring at an egg-carton-grey sky. Elsewhere, we see pigeon fanciers, rag-and-bone men, circus ringmasters, confabbing housewives and brangling corner-boys. What leaps out from these canvases is not the Lowry influence, but Tucker’s admiration for Edward Burra — the English painter of surreal, vividly satirical urban scenes, and another maverick who, like Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, was “out of key with his time.” Indeed, Tucker’s scenes are strangely anachronistic. To a millennial eye, only the concrete bollards and streetlights distinguish them from the Edwardian era.
In truth, the same might be said of much of Warrington today. It certainly could of the street I grew up on, only a few streets away from Tucker, in the late 1990s. Yet the fact that Tucker rarely dated his pictures feels significant: it suggests they were never intended as nostalgia or mere social record, to be framed in glass-walled museums as exhibits of a world willingly forgotten. Like Burra, he paints with an unaffected affection for a world that is conventionally reckoned drab or ugly—a world which, in Tucker’s case, is now considered as lost to time as Woolworths or TheWheeltappers and Shunters Club. Yet so deeply immersed was Tucker in this forgotten North that one feels the artist is still there, in these pictures. So too, it seems, are his characters. I need only open the door and look.
LUKE GILFEDDER is a writer from Manchester, whose debut novel, Die When I Say When, came out in 2025. Previously, he worked as a playwright, with scripts produced at the Royal Exchange Manchester, the Lyric Hammersmith, and in London’s West End. He has recently completed a PhD on the life and work of Wyndham Lewis
