Posted on by Christopher Sandford

50 years of Sticky Fingers

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD recalls the shambolic genesis of the Stones’ masterpiece

At about eleven on the Monday morning of 9 March 1970, a somewhat distressed-looking olive green, midsized BMC lorry of the kind typically used to haul heavy goods around the country, crunched up the gravel driveway of a sprawling manor house located just outside the village of East Woodhay on the Hampshire-Berkshire border. The driver of the truck was a burly 31-year-old with the uncompromisingly Scots name of Ian Stewart, and he was there not to deliver industrial equipment but to help record a rock and roll album.

For the next several hours Stewart and two assistants threaded dozens of multicoloured cables through the home’s heavily studded front doors and into the entrance hall, in due course installing drum kits and guitar amplifiers, knocking together crudely fashioned isolation booths like the old sensory-deprivation chambers in TV’s Double Your Money, and plugging in a forest of microphones against a backdrop of musty chandeliers and ancestral portraits that stared down in silent reproach at the cast of shaggy-haired residents gradually emerging from all corners of the home, whose doll-like smallness gave them the air of elves curiously inspecting a room in an advancing state of preparation for a party.

Stargroves

The somewhat implausible name of the house was Stargroves, and at that time it was owned by Mick Jagger. Jagger and his band the Rolling Stones – for it was they – had elected to record in this manner in order to relieve themselves of the tedious 9-5 restrictions of a traditional commercial studio. By doing it their way the five band members and their auxiliary musicians could plug in whenever the mood took them, and the 8-track console installed in the back of the truck parked outside would capture the results.

It was a good idea, and it almost worked. Jagger himself, along with his colleagues Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts and Mick Taylor duly spent much of the next six weeks cutting the basic tracks for what became the group’s ninth British LP, and the first to be released on the band’s own label, and which, after toying with the likes of Sour Grapes and – for some compelling reason – The Vagina Album, they named Sticky Fingers. For his part, the Stones’s narcotically-inclined guitarist and on his day leading creative force Keith Richards sometimes made it to the recordings, and sometimes didn’t. If a session was called for, say, ten o’clock at night, Keith might stroll in around three in the morning accompanied by his entourage of spliff-wielding Rastafarians, waif-like young women and sundry other advisers and assistants notable for their heavy use of mascara and the leather satchels clutched in their arms.

Before long, certain other challenges inherent to the concept of a group of young rock musicians working without external supervision also asserted themselves. As the weeks wore on, there were frequent arguments and absences throughout the band. The rhythm section of Wyman and Watts were both married men with children, and more than once they expressed their distaste for working through the night in a colleague’s remote country estate located some 80 miles from their own suburban-London homes. Several witnesses later noted that even the consummately professional Jagger would periodically down tools, if the phrase weren’t so inappropriate, whenever one of his specially favoured female companions appeared at Stargroves. “Suddenly”, Ian Stewart once told me, “there were days when Mick disappeared upstairs”.

Perhaps all rock and roll albums should be made with comparatively primitive technology installed in the back of a truck parked outside the door, with creative differences being not so much aired as shouted out, because the result of the Rolling Stones’s labours, as buffed up by the band’s wunderkind producer Jimmy Miller at various locations over the course of the next twelve months, and formally released on 23 April 1971, remains arguably the masterpiece of their long career.

It would require a life of more than mere detachment from the whims of popular culture, and devoted instead to the most austere monastic seclusion, for the reader not to be on terms of at least passing familiarity with the album’s opening number ‘Brown Sugar’. A – or the – classic frothy Stones raveup, it had curious origins. In the summer of 1969, hard on the heels of events such as the firing and almost immediate death of the Stones’s founding genius Brian Jones, and the band’s perhaps ill-advised free concert in front of 300,000 fans in Hyde Park just two days later, Mick Jagger had flown to Australia with his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull to take the lead role in Tony Richardson’s film Ned Kelly – the idea presumably being that one rebel, no matter how slight his screen-acting experience, should play another. The production got off to a bad start when Jagger was forced to walk a gauntlet of protesters on arrival at Sydney airport, indignant that their nation’s 19th-century outlaw hero should be portrayed by, as one of the signs had it, a “pommy faggot”. Following that there was the near-fatal overdose of Jagger’s costar and travelling companion, which again saw the words ‘Stones’ and ‘drugs’ deployed in close proximity to one another in the world’s tabloid headlines. Tony Richardson promptly dropped Faithfull from the cast of Ned Kelly, which would go on to grace all the ‘Worst Movies in History’ lists following its limited release in June 1970. Adding injury to insult, Jagger was badly hurt when, once out on location, a prop pistol exploded in his hand. The unit nurse stitched him up and told him to keep his right arm immobile. Preferring to doctor himself, Mick instead picked up a guitar one afternoon and idly strummed a two-bar phrase around the C, G and F chords, then threw in some hurriedly improvised bondage-fantasy lyrics. This happy collision between boredom and physical therapy would be the best thing to come out of Ned Kelly. Once back in London, Jagger and Richards swiftly worked up the riff into ‘Brown Sugar’.

Next up on Sticky Fingers was a hidden gem called ‘Sway’, a solid if largely unremarkable reminder of the band’s blues roots until Mick Taylor suddenly swooped in with a bottleneck slide guitar during the bridge, and a dramatic, virtuoso outro solo that may represent the finest 30 seconds of his five-and-a-half year tenure as a Rolling Stone. Another swift gear change ushered in ‘Wild Horses’, a lovely ballad in its way even if Ian Stewart, doubling as the band’s primary roadie and occasional pianist, had pronounced himself unwilling to perform on any ‘Chinese shit’, as he termed music with minor chords, when called upon to accompany the track. Essentially a love song from Keith Richards to his partner Anita Pallenberg, Jagger rewrote the lyrics as a plea to Marianne Faithfull to rejoin him after she’d stepped out with one of Anita’s exs (all very fraternal were the Stones in those days), the painter Mario Schifano. It perhaps wouldn’t be hard to locate the names of certain rock and roll bands who over the years have embarrassed both their audiences and themselves by their misguided attempts at the romantic air – somehow I’m always reminded on these occasions of the baroque strains of Spinal Tap’s immortal ‘Lick My Love Pump’ – but what’s extraordinary here is that the Stones are at their most convincing when they aim at the sublime.

Next up: the gloriously eccentric ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking’, a rock-guitar groove that swerved halfway through into a mariachi jam session. It was pronounced No. 25 on one of Rolling Stone magazine’s incessant lists of The 100 Greatest Rock Songs of All Time, but even without that particular bauble it would be hard for any normally sensate listener to remain wholly unmoved by Keith Richards’s shattering opening guitar bolt and the collective locomotion of his four colleagues and their sidemen – Bobby Keys on tenor sax to the fore – that followed. Side One, as such things were then designated, ended with the Stones’s somewhat frazzled take on Mississippi Fred McDowell’s classic spiritual ‘You Gotta Move’, which they’d initially cut in embryonic form at around three one morning in December 1969 while crouched around a microphone positioned in a toilet bowl (for that ‘shitty sound’, as Keith approvingly put it) at Muscle Shoals studio in rural Alabama.

Flip the disc over, and you had the horn-drenched blowout of ‘Bitch’, after which things calmed down with three songs – ‘I Got the Blues’, ‘Sister Morphine’ and ‘Dead Flowers’ – with seemingly little in common but their border-jumping from the world of roots rock and roll into those of country and soul, and back again, not to mention their assorted drug references and the basic premise of ‘Morphine’ itself, with its gory allusion to Marianne Faithfull’s recent miscarriage.

The whole thing wound down with the soporific ‘Moonlight Mile’, a weirdly insinuating slab of orchestral blues with lyrics one earnest American reviewer described as a “rare case of Mick Jagger letting go of his public persona, offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the weariness that accompanies the pressures of keeping up appearances as a sex-drugs-and-rock and roll star”, and another perhaps overextended himself by comparing to W.B. Yeats. The song had a curious and on the whole less exalted genesis. Keith Richards had first strummed the moody chords to ‘The Japanese Thing’, as the track was then known, while sitting on the kitchen floor, a bowl of cereal in his lap, late one night at Stargroves. Initially there had been something of a skeleton crew present at the moment of creation, with just Charlie Watts on drums and the trumpet player Jim Price improvising on piano. Mick Jagger was upstairs in his boudoir, Bill Wyman had also retired, and nobody knew exactly where Mick Taylor was after his co-guitarist had informed him, “Don’t bother to play on this – you’re too bloody loud”. Six months later, Keith was too stoned to make it to the final session for ‘Moonlight Mile’, which the two Micks put together in his absence. Taylor later expressed a certain surprise to see his name omitted from the song’s all-important writing credit, an early milestone down the road to his decision to defect from the band in December 1974.

Kali – unlikely inspiration for the Stones’ slavering lips and tongue logo

Even without the bulging Andy Warhol-designed crotch on the front cover, and the particularly lubricious advertising campaign that met its release, Sticky Fingers could be said to definitively capture the debauched essence of the Rolling Stones in all their strung-out 1970s glory. It was also the first product to feature the band’s iconic trademark, inspired, apparently, by the Thug goddess Kali, and actually drawn by a young Royal College of Art student named John Pasche. Pasche was paid his standard design fee, fifty guineas. That tongue and lips logo, slavering in a cunnilingual leer, would soon be recognisable to millions of people around the world who never bought a rock record or attended a concert: it remains today the ultimate pop-culture accessory.

The last sight that many Britons thought they would ever have of the Rolling Stones was of the band camping its way through ‘Brown Sugar’ on Top of the Pops. Mick Jagger vamped it up in a pink satin suit, Keith Richards’s chugging guitar drove the teenaged audience into a synchronised boogie, and the rest of the band mimed frantically away as best they could. By the time the clip aired on the evening of 15 April 1971, the Stones themselves were already safely ensconced in their new South of France domiciles, either victims of a merciless Establishment backlash, or, more prosaically, of the Inland Revenue’s attentions to their back earnings, depending on which version of events you prefer. Either way, the sessions for their next album moved from Mick Jagger’s relatively sedate Home Counties estate to the more ramshackle charms of Keith Richards’s digs on the Riviera, and the last of the band’s indisputably great albums would duly emerge under the title Exile on Main Street. But that’s another story.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Rewriting the Middle Ages

LIAM GUILAR likes a radical reimagining of a venerable Welsh work

Isolated in Aber Cuawg

Harry Gilonis, Oystercatcher Press, 2020, 19 pages

‘Claf Abercuawg’ is a Welsh poem composed perhaps in the ninth century. Claf, as a noun, means a sick person, a patient or a leper1. Abercuawg is an area of north Wales. There is an ‘I’ who looks out at the landscape and speaks about it and his isolation.

This pamphlet contains an English translation of 32 three line stanzas, a short introductory essay, placed significantly after the poem, and some textual notes. The essay is a concise, necessary introduction to the differences between this poem and a modern English one. The pamphlet is visually attractive, robust enough to handle the rough usage it has received, and overall very good value for money.

The opening line announces the poem’s difference: “My mind’s requirement, to be sat atop a hill”.

In the 1970s, Glyn Williams translated this as “To sit high on a hill is the wish of my heart”2

Superficially, Williams sounds more natural, and perhaps immediately preferable. But the differences in word choice and order reveals the strength of Gilonis’ translation.

Generally3 the contemporary trend seems to be to assume that the people of the Middle Ages were modern people in funny clothes, suffering from bad ideologies and severe technological deprivation. The consequences of such assumptions are numerous and they are all bad. The logic runs that because these people are us, then their stories can be presented as we think they should have been written, or would have been written if the original composers weren’t so clumsy. And because they are ‘like us’ then they should have known better. Therefore, the things modern observers find reprehensible in medieval behaviour and ideals can be easily condemned and preferably erased, because both are easier than trying to understand the essential alterity of the period.

The most invidious and invisible form of this domestication is when a translator surreptitiously converts a medieval text so it operates to modern, post-Romantic assumptions of how poems should function, and how a modern person would behave or think in that situation.

Gilonis, to his credit, avoids these traps. Ironically, part of the effectiveness of this translation lies in what he hasn’t done. “My mind’s requirement” does not sound like modern English. But it’s grammatical and makes sense. He walks the fine line between respecting the alterity of the original and turning the poem into something that works in English. He does this without domesticating the original, or turning it into a museum piece.

The translation, as translation, can be compared with different translations. Here are three versions of the last verse; Gilonis’ is the third.  

The Leper was a squire; he was a bold warrior

In the court of the King

May God be kind to the outcast.

Jenny Rowland4

A youth was Leprous; once a bold leader

In the royal palace.

God be kind to the outcast.

Joseph P. Clancy5

Isolated, once a warrior, once a champion, daring

Once in the court of a king

May God be kind to the outcast.

I prefer Gilonis’ version, but the key objective difference is the disappearance of ‘leper’. While Jenny Rowlands goes to some length to show how the speaker of the poem is indeed a leper, she’s also aware that it is not the only option (pp.191-193). The original poem would not have excluded other interpretations. As she points out, the solitary figure in a hostile landscape, well-known to readers of Old English, is as much a symbol of life on earth (with or without God) as a literal character. But translating claf as ‘leper’ would be to choose one option and for the reader of the translation to limit those other interpretations. It also throws the poem into the distance.

Gilonis defends his decision not to translate claf as ‘leper’ in the notes. The poem isn’t distanced from the modern British or American reader and the other possible readings of the text remain open.

Obviously the idea of someone isolated due to illness has an immediate contemporary relevance. The temptation would be to push the point, the use of deliberate anachronisms being a popular technique. Gilonis writes: “The resonances, in 2020, don’t need ramming home” (p10).  In 2020, ‘isolated’ was such a loaded word it should resonate without ventilators or prayers for vaccines turning up in the translation.

One of the strangest features of this poem is that, as in Old English poetry at this period, the speaking ‘I’ is an empty space anyone one reading the poem can step into. It’s merely a subject position, not an historical or fictional character, nor the product of autobiography. This is emphatically not a dramatic monologue in the Browning/Tennyson tradition, nor an ‘I’ in the tradition of English poetry from Wyatt onwards. While some speakers in the ‘saga poems’ of medieval Wales are characters in a fuller story, the speaker in this one exists only in this poem.

Some early Welsh verse, like this, simply don’t operate to the rules we assume govern modern poetry in English. There’s no clearly developed progression from an opening to an ending. There’s no ‘internal coherence’. The poems operate to their own rules, and those rules, leaving aside the complicated metrics, simply aren’t post-Renaissance or classically inflected English. There is description of landscape, but whether it’s meant to evoke the speaker’s mood or describe a place is questionable, and whichever answer you pick in one instance will be undermined in another.

Description is jammed against statement: but the relation of the two seems marginal, and the statements, as in the second line below, might be gnomic wisdom or just statements of fact. Either way, their relevance is never obvious:

Bright are the tops of the valleys; long the small hours.

Expertise is always praised.

Am I not to be granted the sleep due to the ill?

Temporally the poem hops around, sometimes in the same stanza. The overall effect is that the poem is swirling, but the swirl isn’t spiralling to any conclusion, just to the last word, where the poem stops. Gwyn Williams only translated ten of the 32 verses, but the ’extraction’ (his term) doesn’t seem to damage the poem in any way.

For general readers of English poetry, the pragmatic value of early medieval poetry, treated honestly as it is here, lies in the challenge it makes to the learnt reading practices of the school room and the lecture hall. A poem like this one, that obviously works, but not to ‘our’ rules, is a confrontation with the limits of our reading practice, and our assumptions about what a poem is, does, and can be.

This difference between what worked for a medieval Welsh audience and what a modern reader of poems expects gives the translation another level of interest. The original might have been written over 1,000 years ago, but this translation wouldn’t be out of place in something like Harriet Tarlo’s 2011 anthology of ‘radical landscape poetry’6.  

As such, it’s a blunt reminder that any claims made by ‘avant garde’, ‘experimentalist’ or ‘postmodern’ poets in the 21st century for the ‘innovative’ or ‘ground breaking novelty’ of their work is undermined, if not flatly contradicted, by the history of poetry. Whatever ‘it’ is, ‘it’ has usually been done before. This should negate the familiar excuse for writing abstruse nonsense – ‘But it hasn’t been done before’ – and focus the question on ‘Was it worth doing?’

  1. http://geiriadur.ac.uk/gpc/gpc.html [↩]
  2. Welsh Poems Sixth Century to 1600, Faber and Faber, 1973, p.23 [↩]
  3. ‘Generally’ in terms of popular culture, films, books, and public discussions [↩]
  4. Early Welsh Saga Poetry: a study and edition of the Englynion, D. Brewer 1990. p. 497. This is the essential encyclopaedic text, commentary, study and translation of these poems. Rowland makes no claim for her translations as ‘literature’ [↩]
  5. The Earliest Welsh Poetry, Macmillan 1970. p.94. Clancy reverses the order of the last two verses so this is the penultimate in his translation [↩]
  6. The Ground Aslant. An anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, Shearsman, 2011 [↩]
Posted on by Caroline Davies

Four poems by Caroline Davies

CAROLINE DAVIES has an MA in Writing Poetry from the Poetry School and Newcastle University. Her books are Elements of Water (Green Bottle Press 2019), Convoy(2013) Voices from Stone and Bronze(2016) (Cinnamon Press).  She co-hosts the Ouse Muse poetry readings (Bedford) currently taking place online.  These poems are from her latest project, Strange Alchemy, poems inspired by the life and works of Paul Nash (1889-1946).

The Pencil Game

This baby was a mystery, a gentle swell

in my wife’s tummy like a wave waiting to break.

Now he gazes at us with his dark eyes

a thick shock of black hair.

I have stumbled into his childhood

without any thought of how to be a father.

I have invented a game with a pencil.

It has to be a red one, he has no interest in black.

As I move it towards him, his fingers open like a starfish

then close with the pencil tightly grasped.

Portrait of the Artist as a Student

In my bedsit the walls are restless with roses,

flowers and buds trail from ceiling to the floor

as if the briars hid a sleeping beauty.

They grow in my dreams,

reach out with bristling stems,

surround my bed with towers of thorns.

I cover the walls with paper of palest grey

and hang curtains of darkest blue,

a midnight shade, to screen the world outside.

The room falls silent, a glass of clear water.

Now I can begin.

I poured out my sovereigns amongst the teacups

Gold, pure gold and freshly-minted

as if the Carfax Gallery was the Bank of England,

with a clatter coins went for a spin and roll

across the table before they came to a rest.

Carrington’s hair gleamed a red-gold halo

lit by an inner flame above her pale shoulders.

I slipped down to the floor to sit, cross-legged,

beside her and she poured tea

into a mismatched cup and saucer,

all delicate bone-china,

the tea black with a smoky taste

not like the dust-grey canteen stuff,

the room warm and incandescent,

and for a moment I was in heaven.

Shreds

This thin peace is like gruel.

England a dismal place,

I am unable to settle.

I feel exhausted all the time.

Days pass as if I am asleep.

All I can do is paint.

The movement of the brush

across the canvas

leaves a thick brown trail.

I must purge what is in my head:

blasted trees – blood red clouds.

Here, outside, the corn ripens in the fields.

All I can do is paint.

I must rob the war

of its last shred of glory.

Posted on by Daniel Gustafsson · 1 Comment

Beacons – Brands – The Loki Stone

DANIEL GUSTAFSSON has published volumes of poetry in both English and Swedish, most recently Fordings (Marble Poetry, 2020). Much inspired by the beauty and history of both his native and adoptive shores, exploring themes of cultural and spiritual regeneration derived from Blake and Scruton, among others, Daniel’s increasingly formal work also shows an interest in alliterative verse. Recent related work appears in The North American Anglican and in Black Bough Poetry’s Deep Time Volume 1. With a PhD in Philosophy, Daniel also makes occasional contributions to academic journals and conferences. He lives in York. Twitter: @PoetGustafsson  

BEACONS

We saw it come. The low,                           

lengthening shade emerged at summer’s close   

to stalk the hogweed, stem the rose,

and leech the commons clean 

of light. Through meadows, mown, and fields

with little left to glean,

                   

the prey was run to ground.

We saw the once unchallenged sun beset;

his trailing robes, resplendent yet

though stained with ochres, snag

on bramble-thorn; his even course

begin to list and lag. 

                   

We knew what darkened lanes

ensued, yet saw the sparks enkindled there;                      

how, birch to quickbeam, beacons flared

to raise the late alarm,        

presaging pathways lined with rust

and ash: a call to arms

                   

for each of autumn’s sons

to carry fire, linking lanterns, hips

with crimsoned haws; an ill-equipped

and self-defeating quest

to halt this great diminishing

that haunts the waning west.

BRANDS                              

The streets are overrun

with marchers; banners climb the righteous tide;

while those who err on caution’s side

remain some way apart,

upholding those unflagging words

the crowd won’t take to heart. 

                   

We’ve seen it all before: 

how slogans, slander, slag of language, smear

the public square. Even so, here    

in this beleaguered town,

a moneyed mob, brought up in arms

to tear its elders down,

                   

declares the end has come,            

the zero sum of all offending years:

the stakes are raised to frenzied cheers

as strawmen take the blame.

Though fury is the fashion now

and all are fans of flame,

                   

this too will fizzle out;                                

through smoke of sleepless nights’ utopian dreams,

the slanting rays and broken beams

when dawning crawls around        

will find us less enlightened still               

for loss of common ground.

THE LOKI STONE

(Fragment of a 10th Century Anglo-Scandinavian cross-shaft;

Kirkby Stephen, Yorkshire)   

While this stone is standing,

still untoppled, pillar                             

guarding grace and order;

guileful Loki yoked here, 

finely patterned fetters

foil him, sinuous coils of                       

bramble; horned-one humbled,           

hate’s designs frustrated;   

                   

threads not loosed yet; these en-

thralling drystone-walls and                     

hog-backed ridges, hedgerows

hooping, bindweed looping, 

braiding streams and bridges;

bands of lore, a landscape’s                  

tropes of love entrap him,

trothless, bound to nothing;

                   

till these tethers wither,

torn at last, unfastened,

reins of roots and vines un-

ravelled, freeing havoc;

columns, ash and elm, up-

ending, arches rending;

rock of ages racked though       

raised for glory; praise it.  

                   

This poem is composed of three dróttkvætt stanzas. Essentially each stanza contains eight lines with three trochaic feet in each line. The odd-numbered lines have two alliterating staves which alliterate with the first syllable in the even-numbered lines. Within the odd-numbered lines, two of the stressed syllables share half rhymes (of consonants with dissimilar vowels; stone-stand, pattern-fetter); while within the even-numbered lines, two of the stressed syllables rhyme (though not necessarily at the end of a word; still-pillar, foil-coils). In the case of both odd- and even-numbered lines, the second partial or full rhyme always falls on the penultimate syllable of the line (the stressed syllable in the third trochaic foot).

Posted on by Janet Kenny

Four poems by Janet Kenny

JANET KENNY is very old. She has been an opera and concert singer, anti-war activist, editor, publisher’s researcher and food writer. Born in New Zealand, sang in the United Kingdom, agitated in Sydney and now watches birds in Queensland. Her poems have been widely published. She co-edited, compiled and wrote Beyond Chernobyl published by Envirobook; Her two collections of poems are This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press) and Whistling in the Dark (Kelsay Books)

Antal Szalai’s Gypsy Band in an Australian Country Town

The country concert hall is full

of old Hungarians who’ve come

from miles away to hear the thrill

of tarogato, cimbalom,

but most of all—the violin.

And what a violin! They say

that after he had heard him play

Yehudi Menuhin embraced him,

so deeply had Szalai impressed him.

When they start there’s such a shock

as though the world had run amok

sound rips around the walls and hits

the ceiling, strikes the metal parts

of doors and watches, and the hearts

of sleepers who have come to life,

and young again, accept the knife

of youth and pain; the lightning bursts

in every space and now it’s Liszt’s

transfiguration, Gypsy grief

and desperation, time the thief, 

it weeps then changes with a bang,

to pure delight as high notes hang

above the hall so high they hurt

with panpipes conjuring a bird; 

they’re old, this audience, and know

that this is love, the silent bow

that holds suspended all they are

then lets them down through sunlit air;

the gypsy and the bird are free

like them, they leave him thankfully

in songs and dances, out the door

to Queensland which they never saw

the way they see it now, with strings

to all the loved remembered things.

Flying Foxes 

Mega-chiroptera

Fruit bats hang in clumps atop

the canopy. Plumb head-down drop

of screechbats. Nosferatu crops

of dangling-grippers shuffle out

on tight-crammed branches; poke to flex

ribbed, leather black umbrella wing

as prod displaces neighbour’s roost.

Stench circles trees in clouds of retch.

Night falls, then lifts of creatures streak

across the sky on ancient tracks,

air-trod by troops of foxbats, hot

to reach the fruit of memory,

wing wafts of time above the road.

Tienanmen Shopper

         Whatever happened to him

  that man with the shopping bag?

     You all saw how

     he moved from side to side,

     head erect, graceful,

     as the tank moved, 

     trying to avoid 

     his intransigent blocking figure.

     The driver was a man too, 

      and felt for this

     stubborn stubborn  man

     who refused refused  to

     move and we watched,

     hearts in mouths, never knowing

     whether he lived or died.

     What happened…what… what did happen

     to that stubborn stubborn  man?

Wild

Here for a flash then not. God, did you see

the streak of eyes, the fleeting blur, the space

vacated when you thought there was a face?

The silent grace where now a stolid tree

refuses to divulge just what it was

passed by its vigil. Four feet, two or none?

Grass won’t expose a creature to the sun.

Discretion in cahoots with beasts because

a law denies betrayal of the catch

to predators who watch but miss the track

till jaws or beak or claws make swift attack

when luck dismembers prey that met its match.

Each on its own united by the same

entrapment in an old sadistic game.

A scientific mechanism made

by particles that never feel afraid.

Posted on by Andrew Thornton-Norris

Richard Whiting – Comedy – The god of modern life

ANDREW THORNTON-NORRIS is the author of The Spiritual History of English, described by The Times as “an enjoyable, erudite and cohesive journey through the history and philosophy of English literature in 150 pithily written pages.” He is also an accomplished poet, described by the University Bookman as “refreshingly direct, in contrast to contemporary poets whose poems are like hearing half of a telephone conversation [his are] like a Renaissance painting of the Crucifixion falling off a museum wall onto a viewer.” His website is at www.thornton-norris.com

Richard Whiting

(Last Abbot of Glastonbury and Martyr)

My little children, lives stretched out before

Them, mine all but behind me. Relics of

The saints provide our continuity,

The ones who live in perpetuity,

Their bones and clothing, just like we are in.

The falling leaves are death, turned into life,

This child of myself, I see him cry,

Beside his father, as his father cries.

Comedy

Among the pagan dead, I caught a glimpse

Of what lies down below, of all the dead,

Their bodies writing in their torment, what

They thought was pleasure, now they know as pain.

The sea of souls above are swimming in

The light, and all the pilgrims on their way

Of penitence, from earth to heaven above,

Their eyes fixed on the light of holiness.

The god of modern life

A childlike god, more weak and petulant

Than Nero, clothed in gold and palaces

But destitute inside, with hatred where

Religious souls have love, and joy and peace.

So, throw them to the lions, let us love

Our selves, and those on our side alone,

As Germans did in nineteen forty three,

And so did we, in Dresden and Japan.

The empire is collapsing from inside,

And Mary is the mother we betray,

By our disobedience we wound,

Again, the Body of her Son, again.

Posted on by Rahul Gupta

Seasonal Interlude for an Arthurian epic: from Autumn


RAHUL GUPTA holds a PhD from the University of York for a thesis on Old English and Norse poetry and the 19th-20th century mediævalist alliterative revival. His poems, prose, and translations have been published in Agenda, Acumen, Eborakon, Equinox, Molly Bloom, Spectral Realms, and Wiðowinde, among other journals, and online by British Intelligence, and The Society of Classical Poets. His main enterprise is a reinterpretation of the Arthurian legends retold as an epic in ‘the most accomplished, imaginative and technically-correct alliterative verse in Modern English since Tolkien’ (Tom Shippey), from which two excerpts have appeared hitherto, in The Long Poem Magazine, Issue 15, May 2016, and, ‘one of the truly great mythic works of our time’ (John Matthews) in The Temenos Academy Review, Issue 21, 2018. Forthcoming publications include a volume of metrically-imitative verse-translations from Old English and Norse, seeking faithfully to retain the style and versification of the originals whilst being accurate and performable aloud, from Reaktion Books

* * *


[…] Zigzagging tines, zed-shaped lightning’s

pronged weapon probes  the primy soil:      

and we follow the flash, foining groundward

in his points’ pathway, to pierce the turf.

Let the earth open. We enter within.            Follow the lightning into the earth

Here levels below  living daylights

an under-earthen, otherworldly

landscape layered  below the surface

nests beneath us.

                          This unknown domain,

her roofs writhing  with roots of trees,

is the nameless netherdepth, benighted regions

of an occult kingdom:                                                   Katabasis: the Underworld

                           necropolis

of catacombs;

                           sarcophagi

decayed in crypts,

                           caves inhuming

putrid matter;                                                                                                              

                           sepulturings

enwombed in warrens,

                           winding myriad                                                         Tombs

charnel-chambers,

                           chimneys linking    

fœtid fogous,

                           foul souterrains,         

deep-delved dungeons:

                           dusky vaultage

—heaped-up deathsheads—

                            —hoards of longbones—

of grave-galleries;

                           groping steeply,

tombpassages twist                                       

                          through turnagains                                                                       

to undercrofts,

                          while oubliettes

fold fathoms downwards,

                          to Filth’s Mansion.

Pell-mell we plunge:

                          panoramic

horizons range

                         as we reach deeper:

like tumbledown,

                         topsy-turvy

sunken cities,

                         a sewerscape

of terraced wards,

                         tiers and platforms,                                                       Sewerage

doors downfallen,                              

                         to dark culverts

with grille-gratings, 

                         green slime-curtained;

canted causeways

                         on the chasms’ brink:

skewed screwthreading

                         escaliers

leaning, looming;

                           labyrinthine:

the abyss beckons,

                           the bowels of the Earth.

It yawns beyond; a yearning maw.

Here tribes of rats  get trapped by cave-ins,

wriggling rodents  whose runs are thwarted:

dead-ends their doom; dens are shrinking,

their nests narrowing  as numbers grow

in blind alleys  and blocked cisterns   

to a mangy mass  of mating bodies.

Like their neighbour vermin, knotting reptiles

—keystones crushing— they kitten yet;

till the chamber chokes  to chink and cranny

with tangled tails.   Teeth start to gnaw.

From the maze of tombs, the morgue-ullage

bleeds to these bilges; their black vomits

emulge and merge, commingled blend

of what seeps from cellars, with sordors leaching

to earthy entrails. For from all the jakes—

from countless catchments, through clogged spillways,

dreckcrusted drains, downspout scuppers,   

from every addlepool  and each latrine,

ripe reredorter, reasty midden,        

siegehouse, cesspit —of our sunlit world,

the gong-farmings  of garderobe soil,

loose cack of lasks, and laystall-slops,

helter-skelter, the whole system’s

sickly surfeit  of sewage-waste,

in a swilling swelchie, is swallowed down    

through intestine-tunnels, and tewel-pipes

from the upper echelons  to the enclaves beneath:

engulfed by gulches. The gurge of sludge

empties ordures  to the uttermost sump

where lurks waiting, in a lake of slime,

a prodigious dungheap.                                                                          Excrements

                                     Dirts steam. Dritt of foxes,   

                                     deer-turds. Merd and fewmet,

                                     scat, spraint; fiants, scumbered

                                     skite of otter-crottels;

                                     brock-muck. Brown waggyings

                                     brew, mix: sharn of vixen,

                                     critters’ crap, hare-buttons,

                                     crudded spoor, boars’ lesses           

in a cradling crucible.

                                 The crawling lees  

amalgamate, transmute fusing:

the realm of rottenness is rich with life.  

From clouds to clods, cleaving lightning

wracks with raptures  rainsodden loam,   

and by split seconds  the span between             

the high Heavens and humble Earth                                           

is bridged in brightness: embracing partners  

space sprung apart  espouse again.

Once twins entwined, that twain sundered:

the husband halved  from the whole forebear;                  

now sibling-father, and sister-wife                                              Autumn Equinox

marry for a moment, to mate powers                                                         

high, dry and hot —with the humid deep.

Attraction triggers  the trident-bolt,

the warm wedding  to wet and cold,

the air to fire; earth to water:                                                                 

as when Burn-the-Wind, at his blade-forging,        

that the redshort rod  be wrought to temper            

steeps it in wetness —the steel is slaked                       

amid sputtering fumes  sparks set alight

in quenching oils, to quell its ardour

(and the venoms unveil  viper-chevroned,

woven-welded, worm’s-tongue markings)

—so the glowing glaive, in glutting thrusts         

shooting downward, ensheathes his length.

Ground engulfs him. In her gravid lap

the charge is channelled; for change kindles

where his liquid lightnings  enliven dust.         Lightning fecundates the earth

Behold the happenings  of the hidden places;

witness wonders —from the worms’ vantage.

Shocks shaking her, he sheds darting,

fork-formed currents, forces spending

virile virtue.

                     Pervading the clays

are pores pooling  with pregnant fluids.                                 

Through dropsied ducts, drenched syrinx-glands

in coral clusters, course her issues,

unctions oozing, by ebbs and swells:

what subtle liquors  seep and filter,

yeast-yielding brines, yolky syrups

and saps surging, sifted lispings

in fistule-fissures? Fecund venters                                  

congest with juices  like the jellied slutch

that showers downward  from shooting stars

estranged to earth; sticky chrisms

spill through spiracles; from sponge-bladders,

limbeck-tinctures; elixirs stilling

hoarded honeydews, as harvests culled

from bread of bees, brood-comb drizzlings    

—moist motherlode  milch with nectars.         

The stagnant gulfs  stretch out for leagues

under fen-fastness, fog-bound marshes,

mould-mildewed tarns, and misty fells:

like troves of ore, treasure-laden

rills running through  the rankling dung;             

mine-wealthy malm. The Moon shines down,

her beams bathing  foreboding depths,

the lodes ripening  in lunar rays

and the mire is rife: minims thriving,

krill-creaturely  kinds of plankton,

embryonic  animalcules

at their feast of filth, feed and batten;

its sweats swelter: the swamp-mosses

hum with humours, heats are brooding

in queachy quags, bequickening 

eggs underground. An urgent drive,

for a spell, spurs them. Spores are stirring

awake to sprout  in their weird springtide;

pollen pullulates, to the pulse of the Moon:

cells in seedbeds.  These seminal motes,

cocooned kernels, like chrysalids

shog in their swaddlings: shoot spicules forth,

chaffhusks chinking  as chits are hatching   

from bulging pods, with bat-squeakings,         

in throbbing throes. Threadlets burgeon

to knosplike nebs, whose nippled spires

unfurl feelers  with fanning strands

and barbs burrow  from the umbilical stalk;    

spikes spawn outwards, spider talons

sneaking snakewise.

                                Snail-horn probings

now creep, recoil; then crawl anew,

reaching runners, ramifying

twig-antennæ, that tillow again:

look how the likeness  of the levin-flash

imprints and repeats  in the pattern figured,

as izzard emblems, by the angled forking

of vein-branches, against the varves’ blackness,

pairing, parting; puny scions                                        

like marbling maggots, the murky clods  

riddled with roothairs, wriggling vivers;

weevils delving  worm-farm layers                             

and rifted vugs.    Ravelled suckers                                           

flex flossing wide, in flower-whorling

topdownward trees, their tufted plumes

of glairy gauzes, like gossamer skeins

of squirming thongs.

                                 Squirreltail, thistledown,

filigree fibres  frond their tassels,

twisting, twining; the twirling bines

will splay and split, then splice oscules,  

reticulate   tentacular

chenille nervures.   Thus the net-weaving   

germs engender  a giant ganglion,                

mercurial cobweb, catscradlewise;

node knits to lobe, as a loom shuttles          

a weft-texture, the wiry members

tendril-tissued: a teeming polyp,

quarl of quicksilver. By quetch and spasm

the molten mass  is mapped in darkness,

leviathan-vast.

                          Vivifying,

it inhales and heaves: a heart panting

or brain beating, or as breathing lungs

work in entrails; and wavering sobs

retch restlessly. With rippling surges    

the sprawling globe  spreads yet farther

by ceaseless seethings, circulating

lymphs and ichors; till in labour-pangs   

its ballooning shape  dilates warping.

The morphing mesh  transmogrifies

and with thrilling shudders  it thrusts aloft,

climbs in corkscrews up  to the crust overhead:

fat fruitbodies,  forcing through turves.

From shadowed taths, shapes come pricking,

grope above the grass. Growths are stirring,

bald and gibbous; bulbs are swollen,

puffball-like orbs, whose pimpled membranes

are groined with gills, glabrous-wattled

blanched blubberflesh, bloated organs,

limbs lazarlike; leprous-hided,

sepulchral-pale, they poke upward

from cadaverous depths —dead men’s fingers;

bearded bellyache;

                                 bug agarick, 

webbedpate, skullcap;

                                 witches’ button,

the lewd stinkhorn

                                 and livid earthshank;

skewbald hoodwink,

                                 scurfy funnel;

dwarvish dwalecup,

                                 dwimmer-goblet,

clubfoot-candle;

                                 carl-on-horseback,

charnel-bonnet;

                                 chilly waxglove,

sallowbracket,

                                 sickly milkgall.

Squame-warted squabs  squeeze in sending

stems striking out. Staves like truncheons

unsheathe their shafts, to show helmets,

raise round targes  with rimmed umbos:

espy these spears —a spectral levy

of midnight-mustering  homunculi,

wan weaponedmen, in worm-eaten

carrion-coloured  accoutrements

of clammy coifs  and clinging veils,

by rank on rank, or in rancid circles,

lifts its lances, locks the shieldwall:

earthen armies. From under the ground

—the reek of decay —rotting scarecrows—

they advance in onslaught, an invading horde,

wraiths risen again, arrayed for battle

in dim dreamings  dawn breaks shivering

their feinted front; falter, melt blurring                                 

to stipes like straw …the stuff of shadows

that dwindle to dust. The day broadens

till wilting culms, and caps withering,

return as toadstools.                                                                    Autumn toadstools

                                It is the time of Samhain’s

Cross-Quarter feast, calends of Winter

and a season’s end […]                                                                              


* * *

Posted on by Emma Fennell Hodson

Summers with foxes

EMMA FENNELL HODSON shares some vulpine vignettes

490 kms from Reykjavík lies the coastal harbour town of Ísafjörður. Quaint, colourful wooden houses line its cobbled streets and the fjords loom above the town in every direction. Ísafjörður is the largest town for miles and this is where we would be getting a small boat to take us further north still to the peninsula of Hornstrandir: home of the Arctic foxes.

There’s something about Iceland that keeps drawing me back. I’ve been three times now and plan to return again. I’m awed by the wonder of this almost mystical place with its extensive lava fields sprawling for hundreds of kilometres, the jagged fjords that seem to appear out of nowhere, shrouded in low-lying cloud, the geothermal highlands where the mountains billow steam and gases and the seemingly never-setting summer sun. Up in the Westfjords where we monitor the Arctic foxes, it’s around five miles from the Arctic Circle. This means that in the summer, the sun barely dips below the horizon. On the six hour drive up from Reykjavík to Ísafjörður, the fjords were illuminated in a deep orange glow at 1am. By 2am, the sky had begun to get lighter again and morning sunlight began to replace the deep oranges of the nearly-setting sun.

On the Hornstrandir peninsula, there is very little. There’s a single house and a couple of camp sites; apart from that, it’s all rugged, barren terrain stretching for miles. There’s no phone signal or WiFi on the peninsula, which is remarkably refreshing. I find that the manic pace of modern life can get overwhelming with everyone caught up in what’s happening on social media. Taking a step back from technology and being cut off from the world feels like a massive weight off my shoulders and I find myself more in tune with nature and everything that is going on around me. It would be necessary to take all the supplies with us that we would need whilst being based on what feels like the edge of the world. Loaded with boxes filled with vegetables, pasta, muesli, nuts, Skyr (the most amazing yoghurt in the whole world) and Kropp (these amazing chocolate covered crunchy balls) and an insane number of boiled eggs, we were all set. Don’t get me wrong; we prioritized all the essential things first and all the vital equipment and gear we would need for monitoring the foxes in remote, extreme conditions. But having enough high energy food like nuts, dry fruit and chocolate really does help get you through a cold six-hour monitoring shift!

The boat trip to get to the peninsula is not for the faint-hearted, or perhaps faint-stomached would be a better way of putting it. When the wind picks up as you move away from the shelter of the bay, the water becomes choppy and the boat lurches continuously, both up and down and side to side. If you get sea sick, I recommend you either turn back now, take some kind of sickness pills or arm yourself with a load of sick bags… It’s all worth it when you come round the final corner and see the giant bird cliffs at the tip of the Horn looming in the distance. The air becomes heavy with the odour of slightly rotting fish as you approach the cliffs. Sea birds are wonderful, but they certainly know how to make a racket as well as producing a remarkable array of foul-smelling odours.

I’ve been part of the monitoring team in Hornstrandir for two summer seasons and each time has astounded me. Even the campsite toilet is the most amazing place. That probably sounds weird, so let me explain. A one kilometre walk from the camping area is a Toblerone-shaped wooden structure facing the bay. You leave the door open to let people know you are inside and at the same time you get the most incredible view! I remember one remarkable evening where I was on the loo…the fjords across the bay were illuminated in a deep orange light. A group of Harlequin Ducks were bobbing peacefully on the water’s surface and the calm sea in the bay reflected the golden, cloudless sky. Sitting on the loo at home now feels remarkably dull, I might add.

And then there are the foxes themselves, which are just such wonderful creatures, exceptionally well adapted to life in this unforgiving landscape. They endure harsh temperature extremes but amazingly, they don’t start to shiver until the temperature drops to −70 °C. They have a very dense, multi-layered coat of fur, which provides the best insulation of any mammal and they have fur covering their foot pads as well. Their compact body shape provides a low surface area to volume ratio, meaning that less of its surface is exposed to the cold and therefore less heat escapes from its body. Arctic foxes (Alopex lagopus) are distributed across the Arctic and are Iceland’s only native terrestrial mammal. They come in two different colour morphs, white and ‘blue’. The white foxes are almost completely white in the winter but bi-coloured in the summer, so have seasonal camouflage. The blue morph is dark brown and keeps its colour throughout the year but the sun bleaches the colour in late winter so it’s harder to distinguish between the two forms at this time of year. In the winter, the thick layer of fur makes the foxes look chubby and short legged whilst in the summer they look slender and long- legged.

The massive bird cliffs and extensive coastline of the Westfjords allows for a high density of Arctic foxes to be supported in this area. The foxes of Hornstrandir feed mainly on sea birds, eggs, carrion washed up on the shore, invertebrates and berries. Foxes cache food in the summer so that they have enough to sustain themselves during the harsh winters. The foxes in Iceland have had a turbulent history with the Icelandic settlers and were hunted extensively in the past for their fur. They are also killed by farmers and land owners in order to protect livestock, including eider farms. ‘Den hunting’, in which all animals are killed at a fox den, is one of the oldest paid jobs in Iceland and this is still performed today. There is a difficult balance to be struck with history, tradition, maintaining people’s livelihoods and the future of the Arctic fox population. Hornstrandir is one of the few regions where the foxes are protected in Iceland and people have been incentivized not to kill the foxes by undertaking new jobs in the tourism industry. With more people coming to the peninsula to hike or see the foxes, it is vitally important that the foxes, their dens and their hunting grounds are treated with the respect they deserve.

This respect for the foxes and their habitats is something that is very important to we researchers, especially given that we spend long periods of time monitoring these fantastic animals. The way that we study the foxes is based on a 12 hour daily rotational shift system in which one person monitors the area and records all fox behaviours, barks and interactions for six hours from 10am- 4pm and a second ‘den partner’ takes over at 4pm and continues until 10pm. That’s the beauty of field work this close to the Arctic circle, it doesn’t really get dark at all so there’s not really a time limit of when you need to be back in the evenings.

Being on your own, just you, your thoughts, the foxes and the endless expanse of stunning landscape, is a phenomenal experience. You become tuned into the sounds of the landscape and your eyes become accustomed to scanning endlessly, picking up even the smallest movement. On days where the weather is clear, your mind is occupied and endless cups of tea and snacks see you through to the end of your shift. When the weather takes a turn for the worst, it’s harder to stay focused. I’ve had a couple of shifts where I’ve been in a fog white-out for the entire six hours. You can barely see five metres in front of you and the fog muffles all the sounds from the valley below, leaving your senses straining for any kind of movement or sound. Despite it being summer in Iceland, there are still patches of snow dotted across the peninsula and when the sea mist, fog and clouds roll in, the temperature plummets.

I remember wearing two scarves around my face, having a woolly hat on, a thermal long sleeved top, a hoodie, two thick jumpers, a ski jacket, a waterproof coat, two pairs of thermal trousers, a thick pair of tracksuit bottoms, a pair of waterproof trousers, about four pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves, some thick wellies and being sat inside a plastic bag, yet still being bitterly cold. The air is icy even with not much of your face being exposed and every part of your body feels like it’s losing sensitivity. Maybe I’m just a wimp with the cold – the Icelandic research leaders always seemed to be fine – but let me tell you that I’ve never been as utterly freezing in my entire life. The first couple of hours are OK, but when it gets to around four hours, you can’t really feel your fingers, your toes, your ears, your nose or anything else really. All the while you are trying to scan the area and listen for any sign of movement. As unpleasant as it sounds, even on the bitterly cold days, I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else in the world. There’s this amazing sense of exhilaration of being that connected to the natural world and the elements. And when the weather does clear, it’s the most fantastic feeling being able to see for miles and even more exciting when you can hear foxes barking or see them in the distance, moving about in their territory with such ease and grace.

Whenever I want to escape from the realities of modern life, I close my eyes and I’m back in Hornstrandir, at the edge of the world. I can hear the distant barking of the foxes and feel the icy breeze piercing against my skin. My senses are so in tune to everything around me and I just feel this overwhelming sense of freedom. I feel incredibly humbled to have had the experience of being part of this monitoring team and I hope that this research can continue for many years to come. Increasing our knowledge about Arctic foxes and the way in which they interact with their environment is vital in order to safeguard the future of this remarkable species. There’s a little part of my soul left in that rugged, wild, phenomenal landscape with the Arctic foxes.

Posted on by Mark Patton

From Jim Crow to George Floyd – a street view of US policing

MARK PATTON takes a personal view of the sad trajectory of US race relations

I was five. It was 1957. My recently divorced father had custody of me for the weekend. What I can recall from such a distant time, is that we had been traveling down a rural state road outside of Toledo, Ohio. It was late, I was sleepy and I had no idea of where we were headed to. Suddenly a white station wagon veered into the road from out of a farmer’s driveway. I woke up quickly as I careened into the dashboard and on to the floor as my father slammed the brakes of his faded navy blue, 1952, Chevy. The station wagon passed across the front of our car, then crashed into the rear quarter of another car that had been heading towards us in the opposite lane — instantly ejecting the operator of this vehicle out onto the roadway.

My father jumped out of our car, as did several other motorists. The station wagon then backed off the roadway to the front of the driveway it had come from. Two young men came out of it and leaned against the hood of their car. My father, as well as other witnesses to the accident, went to the aid of a man who had been injured by being catapulted onto the highway. He was sitting in the middle of the roadway and they attempted to get him up onto his feet. But this didn’t work. He kept falling back onto the ground. I later learned that both of his knees had been broken. There he sat, as my father went about collecting papers blowing about from a snapped open briefcase. I could see, from all of the headlights illuminating the scene, that the man was wearing a suit and he was a negro. I had been recently taught to call black people negroes, though coloured people was also acceptable.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol were soon on the scene, and the accident scene was further illuminated by the twirling red bubblegum lights on top of their cruisers. At this point my father reentered our car and attended to me. He felt that this was all a teachable moment for his young son. I gathered from his instruction that the black man was a businessman and an ambulance was on its way to help him to a hospital. My father then pointed to the two teenage farm boys, “See them?” I nodded compliantly, “They are drunk. Watch, the police will soon arrest them.” I then attentively watched the farm boys as they catcalled to the man sitting on the highway, shouting words that I had been taught never to use. The ambulance arrived, but it did not come for the black man. Instead, the ambulance crew persuaded the drunken farm boys to lie upon some stretchers and be carried into the back of the ambulance. Flummoxed, my father assured me that there was another ambulance coming for the man in the street. The police, who had been questioning the black businessman, now pulled him to his feet. Placing handcuffs on him, they loaded him into the back of one of their cruisers to take him off to jail. Shocked, my father went out to argue with them but was soon sent back to our car. Later on, he testified on behalf of the injured black man at his trial, but this did little good. The man received 90 days for reckless driving. To a boy of five, who hero-worshipped his dad, the most astonishing thing that had happened that night was how wrong my father was.
 

                                                                           ***                                                                     

By 1959 I was living in a newly constructed lower middleclass housing development south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It neighboured Wendel, a small mining town that had seen better days. From our small yellow brick house, you could see hilltop orchards, steep pasture for beef cattle and a mountainous slag dump that towered over all. Our slag dump view diminished over the years as it was excavated to make ‘red dog’ driveways. Everyone in our neighborhood had one of those driveways made from heated waste coal and shale tailings. Next to the repetitive brick homes, the orange, pink and metallic purple crushed stone made the neighbourhood more interesting, as did the people who were living in those homes. Most of the children with whom I played in the street had fathers who had been combat veterans in World War II. Mr. Fisher, who lived near us, was in two navy vessels that sank in the Pacific. Despite his ordeals of so frequently treading water, he was perhaps the nicest person in the neighbourhood. There were also several Jewish families on the road. Across from us was a Jewish engineer, his wife and four boys. He too had served in the navy and had seen combat. Next to his house was a Jewish family whose matriarch was a concentration camp survivor. She slept all the time due to depression, and her husband would come out and scold the local children for waking her as they played in the street. Oddly, next to their house lived a German family, the Graffins. The local story concerning Mr. Graffin was that he had deserted the German army by stealing a boat and rowing across a lake to Switzerland. Again, befitting the idiosyncratic nature of the mixing in this neighborhood, the Graffins were bookended on their other side by a pretty young Jewish woman. Her rather incomprehensible story was that at age three she was smuggled out of Germany in a wagon driven by her mother, disguised as a Gypsy. As she told it, they were stopped and interrogated by soldiers, but since they pretended to be Gypsies, they were allowed to cross. Somehow, they managed to squeak through the Germans, even though the Germans were in the habit of rounding up Romani as well as Jews.

Several houses up from her house was another Navy man. He was big, doughy and bald and always wore a white T-shirt, sleeve rolled up to house his Camel Cigarettes, and cutoffs. However, the main reason for this excessive display of flesh was not to be comfortable on a hot day. It was to proudly display all of his maritime sexual conquests. He was tattooed all over his legs and arms with Betty Boop-like women, each bearing a name under them. These women had been memorialized in an assembly line production on his skin, all very similar, more like stamps than tattoos. Perhaps during a bout of nostalgia, he had consumed enough beer to dump his savings on having the job done all at once? He was not shy.  Once while I was playing outside with his son, stepped out of his house, and upon my request, he lifted up his shirt and showed me the continuation of his love life, which lay beneath his T-shirt, inked there on his back and his chest for the duration of his life.

Our neighbourhood seemed to coexist rather well. Of course, there were occasional spats between children and housewives. There was no antagonism between ethnic groups, and the men got on quite well — finding time after their mill work to play a movable game of pinochle — going from one front door stoop to the next, up and down the street. However, two things happened to disrupt the quietude. The first was the night when the man at the top of the hill chased his wife down to the bottom of the hill. The chasing came to an end right in front of our house. I was in bed at the time and heard my playmates shouting,” Daddy! Daddy! Don’t shoot Mommy!” Then there was a bang. Daddy had arrived home earlier than expected from his nightshift, and found Mommy in bed with another man. This was my second encounter with law enforcement. The Westmoreland County Sheriff’s Department arrived, and once again, everything was lit up with flashing lights, this time. However, unlike the black man in the accident, Daddy wasn’t seriously prosecuted, if at all. Domestic bliss soon returned between Daddy and Mommy after the shooting. A few months later, as I was walking up the hill, I met Mommy coming down. I was very excited to see her. For a young boy back then, a bullet wound was about as neat a thing that you could have. So, I asked her if I could see it. There must have been some strange compulsion to lift clothing in this family, for she sheepishly complied, raising her skirt to her knee to display the scar.

About a year after the shooting, the second major local event took place. A Jewish engineer, directly across the street, had put his house on the market and sold it quickly. I remember the day the details of this sale got out. You could see all of the street’s menfolk congregating on the hill to the east of our house and also the hill to the west of our house. They soon came marching down from both directions and were very angry. Puzzled, my stepfather went out to find out what was going on. He too became angry. Then there was shouting for our neighbour across the street to come out and join them. He was very brave, for he did come out. Things became highly animated with cursing and shoving, but the demonstration ended almost as quickly as it had erupted. When my stepfather returned, he announced that our neighbour had sold his house to a mixed-race couple, and that property values were going to plummet, which did turn out to be the case.

Mrs. Brown, our new neighbour, was a huge white woman. She towered over all the men in the neighborhood. Her husband was a tall black man who owned and operated an eighteen-wheeler. They had only one child, a son, who also towered over a normal boy his age. Not long after their moving van pulled up, the Ku Klux Klan was summoned to help do something about the street’s ‘predicament’. One night, while the Brown family was enjoying an outing at the local drive-in theatre, the Klan showed up. They painted their garage door “N—-g—- Go Home, KKK”, and then they set up the traditional blazing fiery cross on their front lawn. When Mr. and Mrs. Brown drove into their driveway in their new shiny black Cadillac, stuffed full of their numerous children, they were quite shaken to see what had happened to their home. The sheriff’s department was called and they were puzzled as to the motivation for this crime. Why would a white family from Kentucky, by the name of Brown, be the object of the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan? Apparently, the Klan had gotten it wrong. They had attacked another Brown family house two streets up. After that, things quieted down. The Browns lived in their house for many decades till they passed away from old age. Mrs. Brown became the Sunday school teacher at the local Presbyterian church, and soon began complaining to my mother about my irreligiosity. The neighbourhood remained quiet for the next eight years we lived in it – and we did have a hard time selling our house.

                                                                              ***

I was 15 in 1967 and visiting my grandfather back in Toledo. At the time, I had a crush on the girl next door to his house. One day I worked up enough nerve to ask her out. To my surprise she said yes.  This was to be the first date for both of us. My grandfather volunteered to drive the two of us to a theatre in downtown Toledo to see the movie Doctor Zhivago. After the picture was over, he was out front in his station wagon waiting to return us home. Initially, it was an uneventful trip. However, as we passed through the black neighborhood on Dorr Street, traffic slowed to a crawl. We had no idea as to what the problem was and assumed that there was a bad accident up ahead. Through the smoke, we saw that there was some kind of road block. The date was July 24th, the evening when the black riots in Detroit spilled over into Toledo. The day before, the Detroit Police had arrested all of the patrons of an after-hours night club welcoming home some Vietnam War veterans. Eighty-four blacks were included in the arrests. The subsequent riot required Michigan’s governor to mobilize nine thousand National Guard. Over 10,000 people participated in this riot, which left 43 people dead. 
At the road block on Dorr Street, a mob of black men was surrounding cars as they tried to pass. Each vehicle was inspected and white men were being pulled out for a beating, before being allowed to move on. I thought we were all goners. We were stuck in line inching our way forward to receive a beating. When we got to where the barricade had been set up, my grandfather was told to roll down his window. A black man then poked his head through. He took a quick look at an old man in his mid-70s and a pair of 15 year-olds in the back seat, and elected not to hand out any beatings. We drove on.

                                                                               ***

Later that year, my family moved to Cape Cod. After graduating from high school in 1971, I became a member of the Research Vessel Chain. After leaving the Chain in 1973, I was offered a job as a summer police officer. I spent the next year pounding a beat and directing traffic. The political climate was similar to what we have today. Cars slowed down, as they passed me standing in the middle of an intersection – making pig noises, grunting, squealing, oinking, saying pig slowly and occasionally spitting. I had never dreamt of being a cop, but suddenly here I was in a blue suit carrying a gun and with one week’s training. I stayed on at the end of the summer as a provisional police officer. The next year, I enrolled in a degree program at Northeastern University’s College of Criminal Justice, graduating in 1979. I worked my way through school, not only as a cop, but also as a Federal fisheries enforcement officer.

Unfortunately, I was handed my degree during a recession when jobs were scarce. But fortunately, I had taken the Massachusetts Civil Service exam for patrolman back in 1978. The scores were slow to be announced. Consequently, I went to Texas and worked in the oil patch until of the results finally came out. What a strange exam. With police racism in mind, the Commonwealth sought to diversify the racial composition of the state’s police departments. To this end, it came up with an interesting multiple-choice exam. Many of the questions had two right answers. The questions were scored one way or another dependent upon which question the majority of minorities chose. However, this scheme didn’t work; not enough minorities had passed the exam, so the final score for passing was lowered to a 65.

By the late 1980s, the Falmouth Police Department was notified by the Massachusetts Civil Service Commission that it was out of compliance with their racial quotas for the composition of its staff. Officially, we had one black. He was my good friend, Percy Kennedy, who went to high school with me. Unofficially, and in reality, the department was close to one third black. The explanation for this was that when individual black officers took the civil service exam, they did not check the black ethnicity box but filled in a blank space entitled other. For them, the other was Cape Verdean. Cape Cod has a significant Cape Verdean population. They came as sailors or cranberry bog workers in the late 19th century. Being from African Islands off of Mauritania and Senegal, Massachusetts Civil Service had no category for them. So, they were not counted as being of African heritage. So, our black chief, of Cape Verdean ancestry, had to go out and recruit two official civil service blacks for our department to be in compliance. He sent the recruited cadets off to a Massachusetts Criminal Justice Training Council police academy. Upon graduating, they were assigned a training officer for three months of hands-on patrol training. Regrettably, one of the trainees was just not meant for the job. After two years of effort, she was still in training. Our chief became fed up, and fired her. This wasn’t an easy thing to do with both civil service protection and police union protection. But that was not the end of it; she turned around and sued our chief through the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination for discriminating against her due to the fact that she was black. We had a black officer suing a black chief for racial discrimination. She received a settlement. Law suits weren’t uncommon in the Falmouth Police Department, and the Town frequently gave plaintiffs $50,000 to go away. It was cheaper that way.

                                                                            ***

I was on duty the night Percy’s brother was shot to death by the Yarmouth Police Department. Percy was called out of his sector and sent to the nearby Cape town to identify his brother, Michael. Michael had been allegedly involved in a burglary. He was pursued by two units and lost control when his vehicle hit sand and skidded into a tree.  He was attempting to back out when the two officers who had been pursuing him approached his car on foot. During the inquest, it was articulated that the two white officers felt their lives were threatened — so they unloaded their revolvers into the car, reloaded and fired again.

I went to the police academy with one of these officers. He was a nice personable kid, who knew an awful lot about guns (maybe too much) and had been out of the academy for about a year when this shooting took place. Oddly, of the fourteen cadets in my class, two of my classmates had shot and killed someone during their first year on the road. No one else from this class shot anyone during the remaining years of their careers. Younger and freshly minted officers are the most aggressive. They have frequently had the ambition of joining a police force from an early age and have had a steady diet of police procedural movies and television series to fire their enthusiasm.

Young officers begin to take notice of the long, layered rap sheets with multiple felony convictions and no significant prison time. That’s when going to court becomes a farce.  It dawns on them that only the judges take the courtroom seriously. Police work becomes a job and ceases to be a calling. Most veteran cops have as a goal getting through their shift with the least amount of trouble. Confrontations, racial or otherwise, are the last thing they want during a patrol.

 Police see the best people at their worst and the worst people at their worst. Everyday contact with the meanest of our species eventually leaves its mark. Memories become choked, not with the names and events of great people and noble deeds but with the rap sheets of local felons and their crimes. Officers soon can recite criminal histories the way David Starkey can discuss the life stories of the monarchs of Britain. When the station dispatcher keys his radio microphone, blood pressure rises through all the department’s patrolling units. No one knows who is going to get the next call or what it will be. For those whose number isn’t called, there is relief. For those who receive a serious call, their minds race through possible scenarios and how they have dealt with similar events in the past, in hopes they will be up to the task.

                                                                         ***                                   

Two years after Officer Kennedy’s brother had been killed, I was on patrol in East Falmouth. The base station microphone was keyed and I got a radio call that kept my blood pressure up for some time. A Golden Gloves boxing champion, who happened to be a black man, was going door to door ringing doorbells and punching out whomever answered. The radio dispatcher said he had fled the scene in a car. He was to be regarded as highly dangerous. My colleagues began piping up on the radio about what a good boxer he was, and that I should be very careful.

I asked the dispatcher for the boxer’s home address and headed there to find him. His mother and sister greeted me at the door, stating he was not there. They asked if they could come with me to look for their relative. Today’s policy and procedures manuals would have forbidden taking civilians for a ride in pursuit of a criminal, but back then you had much more latitude for independent thought. I let the two women into the rear lockdown area of my cruiser. Only a few minutes had past when the station advised me that the man I was looking for was now attacking people at a local supermarket. As we pulled up, the boxer was punching out a tenacious store manager. I took the time to unlock the doors for my passengers, then ran towards him. At this time, an officer in a dispatched backup unit arrived. He did the same thing that I was doing, but then checked himself, and cheerily announced his name while extending his hand. He went down, one two, out cold, with a broken jaw.
I anticipated his throwing a punch. His eyes moved to the right and a right hook came my way. I moved just in time to receive a glancing blow to my head, but still managed to get behind him and place a sleeper hold on his neck. This was a version of what was recently applied to George Floyd – taught in police academies as a way of stopping blood flow to the brain and causing someone to pass out. It is not a choke hold. I had used that hold a lot, with blacks and whites, and it saved me from being the recipient of a beating on many an occasion. However, this time it wasn’t needed. His mother and sister had left my cruiser and were now staring at him in horror.  Suddenly the boxer appeared somewhat sane: “My ladies are here. You got me”. Now subdued, I handcuffed him and then had his ladies transported to the station. He relapsed into delusions as I transported him to the station’s prisoner drive-thru. It was a memorable ride. He was shouting about the devil, and yelling “Michael Kennedy”! Michael Kennedy, my friend Percy Kennedy’s brother. Back then, we had only a cage screen shielding the front seat from the back. The boxer took advantage of this and began spitting through the cage as he kicked at the front driver seat. I still can feel his saliva going down my back.

The shift commander was there to meet us in the drive-thru. He opened my cruiser’s back door and began talking to the boxer. They knew each other, and I could see that now a black officer was there, the raving lunatic went away and the boxer seemingly became normal and complacent.

I was told not to bother to book him but to drive him straight to the Taunton State Mental Hospital, about an hour away. The raving began as soon as I left. When I arrived at admissions, it was nearing 2 AM. The receptionist was in a sour mood. I was incredulous when she told me that, though beds were available, Cape Cod was assigned only five beds, which were all filled. I then had to return to the station, book my devil- talking prisoner, and place him in a cell. By 10 A.M. the next morning, he had been arraigned in court and released on bail.

                                                                            ***

Melvin Reine

For over three decades the Falmouth Police Department and the Town of Falmouth was terrorized by a short, spindly, Cape Verdean garbage contractor with snaps embedded in his scalp for the attachment of his toupee. Melvin Reine, the owner of Five Star Enterprises Garbage Collection, was not physically imposing, but willing to do anything to maintain people’s fear of him. They knew he’d run the risks, commit whatever crime it took to maintain control over the town. They also knew that no one seemed to care.  Melvin was from a large family living off a small strawberry farm. He did not come from money. But he did do a stint in prison, and when he came out he was loaded.
Shortly after I moved to Falmouth, there were a series of fires reported as being due to arson. Eventually, these fires were attributed to Melvin Reine. He was successfully prosecuted for them and did two years in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Cedar Junction. Not long after his release, he quarreled with his wife Wanda. She disappeared. No one has ever heard from her since then, including their two boys, which Reine raised. Around this time, Melvin had been frequenting the company of an 18-year-old girlfriend, Shirley Souza. Coincidentally, her boyfriend, 16-year old Jeffrey Flanagan, was found dead in a cranberry bog just across the street from Melvin’s house. Jeffrey had been executed while on his knees by someone using a twelve-gauge shotgun. Melvin was never charged with this murder. I have seen the initial police report; an auto accident investigation would have had more detail.

The fires started up again, but now mostly for insurance fraud. In 1977, a 17-year-old boy, Paul Alwardt, had been implicated in some of these arsons and was to testify against Melvin before the Barnstable County Grand Jury. Then, like Wanda, he went missing, and like Wanda was never heard from again.

In 1979, Patrolman John Busby was on his way to work when a station wagon operated by Melvin’s brother, John Reine, cut him off.  Shirley was in the passenger seat, and Melvin in the back with the window rolled down. A shotgun was again the choice of weapon. Busby was hit in the face, and his jaw was shattered. None of his assailants were ever arrested for this shooting, but Patrolman Busby was given a new identity and went into hiding for the next seven years.

I was not working for the department at this time, but pursing my degree. By October of 1980, I was again working for the Falmouth Police Department. Though I had not been there for the shooting of Officer Busby, I did talk to a lot of officers who were.  Most felt, as with the Flanagan murder, that there was no serious attempt to investigate the crime. One asserted that Melvin was never questioned, though he was considered a prime suspect for threatening John’s life during an altercation a few days before the ambush took place.

Emboldened by shooting a cop and getting away with it, Melvin got into the habit of lighting a match and saying, “I smell smoke”, whenever he was stopped by a cop for a motor vehicle violation. Though I never had the occasion to stop Melvin, I once stopped his son Todd for illegally driving a garbage truck with no plate or proper license. I hadn’t been out of my cruiser for more than five minutes when Melvin appeared out of the blue. Evidently his car had a police scanner, so he heard me radio the station that I was stopping his son. Now that he was conveniently on scene, I decided to cite him, as the owner of the company that had allowed these violations.

Oddly, as I cleared the scene, I couldn’t get the station on my radio. This wasn’t normal, especially for anyone who was in the process of citing Melvin Reine. Five-minute status checks were mandated for all motor vehicle stops. I kept calling in to say that I had cleared my stop, but there was absolute silence. I began to think that my cruiser radio had failed, when an officer in a neighboring unit responded to my radio traffic. He informed me that the desk officer had announced that he was going to the bathroom. I never had heard an officer make such a declaration on the air. Interestingly enough, this officer had recently volunteered to work the desk radio. His desire to get out of his cruiser and behind a desk was due to the fact that he had had a motor vehicle stop involving Melvin and felt his life might be in jeopardy.

That evening, I ignored regulations and did not file my report and citation concerning Melvin with our station’s court officer.  Instead, I and two other officers who had recently written similar citations for Melvin had our citations hand-carried to the court house by a State Police Captain. This State Police Captain was no fan of the garbage magnate, so made sure our paperwork wasn’t thrown in a convenient court waste basket.

Apparently, Melvin laboured under the misapprehension that the fix was in. He ignored the court house paperwork coming to him through the mail.  Three separate cases and he disregarded them all. Subsequently, the court issued an arrest warrant for him. This was the first time since his release from Cedar Junction that Melvin had been arrested. The flabbergasted Reine was arrested at his house, taken to the station and booked (snap-on toupee removed for photographic purposes) and then arraigned at the Barnstable County District Court.

By 1986, I was the head of a division of the department that was responsible for records, gun permit licensing and press releases. Since the statute of limitations was about to expire on the Busby shooting, I thought I might get the press to do a major story about it and the unsolved murders in hopes of getting some new information that might bring about a prosecution. The editor of the Cape Cod Times agreed to do the story and was taken to North Carolina, where John Busby was in hiding by the State Police. We did not have the chief of police’s consent to do this. We did it on the sly. Only a few people knew about it and they were all necessary to make it happen.

The Cape Cod Times did a full length front page Sunday exclusive. This was the first time that the paper had ever used a colour photo. A bearded John Busby (due to the destruction of his jaw) told the Times in detail about the day he was headed to work and shot in the face. However, the result of all of this effort was the silence of crickets. Nothing happened. No one came forward. However, I did get an angry call back from the editor of the paper. Before going down to North Carolina to interview John, he received a death threat concerning going forward with the upcoming interview. Then the tyres to his car were flattened while he was in his office. Someone had alerted Reine.

By July 1990, I was no longer working for the Falmouth Police Department. I had become the director of the Falmouth Department of Natural Resources. Now there wasn’t any reason for me to have contact with Melvin Reine and I was glad of this. For the next ten years, I heard little about him. Then, on the 27th of October 2000, Falmouth Police Department’s Detective Captain Roman Medeiros (younger brother of the missing Wanda Reine) called to discuss a landfill operation off of Old Barnstable Road. I had no idea that there was such a thing, so we went to the site. It was the old strawberry farm that Reine’s parents had willed to their children.  It was now surrounded by a ten-foot-high earthen berm, which totally masked the mounds of garbage within. We approached the land through a neighboring cranberry bog. When we crested the berm, I was amazed. There were acres of trash, a compound built for Melvin’s garbage trucks, and numerous thirty and one hundred cubic yard waste containers. It was such a flagrant violation of state laws that I felt sure that it must have been recently permitted and I just didn’t know about it. So, I pulled out my cellphone and started calling up officials. First, I called the Board of Health. The Board of Health refused to comment but told me to contact the Town’s engineering department. The Engineering staff would not comment due to their boss being away on vacation. The Building Department did comment, stating that the buildings there were for agricultural purposes, like a strawberry farm.

Soon, I learned that Melvin had been in a fight with his neighbour over the use of this land. The neighbour had called a group of town officials to complain. On the 28th of September, 2000, a mysterious 75-gallon drum of oil was dumped on this neighbour’s property. Of course, this criminal act was witnessed by good citizen Reine, who had promptly reported the spill. The Falmouth Fire Department, the Falmouth Health Department, and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection were alerted. Again, no one notified me. Officials assembled at the scene and received a vague description of the vehicle and perpetrator of this ecological disaster. However, there was no way around it; the assembled officials could plainly see the piles of trash on Reine’s property from the site of the oil spill. They decided to work with him. He could be polite and assuaging when he wanted to, and promised to clean it up…but didn’t. And no one did check back on him. As for the woman on whose land the oil was dumped, she was forced to hire an eco-cleanup firm at her own expense. In desperation, another neighbour called the police, who in turn got hold of me. A search warrant was obtained, which discovered a solid mass of garbage to a depth of fourteen feet. The Massachusetts State Police brought their corpse sniffing dogs to the site. No bodies were found.

I called the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, who permitted all of the state’s landfills. They had no permits for the landfill, so they opened an investigation. However, they soon became spooked and sent the hot potato off to the investigation off to the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Environmental Protection Division. I then arranged for several interviews between the AG’s office and Melvin’s two estranged sons in my office. Melvin’s sons were happy to fill them in. They were upset with their father because of a recent argument. After the argument, one of their houses caught fire.

My department then began developing a second case against Reine. Somehow, an industrial scale town dock from Martha’s Vineyard had been transported across Vineyard Sound, and dumped on private property. Guess who collected the disposal fee?

By now, you can imagine that Melvin was getting a bit peeved with us. Yes, death threats began coming in. A detective called me at home one Sunday to say that Melvin Reine was heard boasting that he was going to hire some boys in Boston to come down to put a man in greensix feet under. Melvin was supposed to have strong connections with the Boston Winter Hill Gang.

It should be noted that Whitey Bulger, the head of the Winter Hill Gang, was the brother of Billy Bulger, the then President of the Massachusetts Senate, and also an active informant for the F.B.I. He too was literally getting away with murder as the F.B.I. protected him from prosecution. This threat seemed plausible. I did ask the detective to put it in writing but he never found the time to do it. I found out about a second threat when an officer working a road detail stopped me and inquired about the death threats that were coming in concerning myself and a reporter with whom I was working. Apparently someone had called the Barnstable District Attorney’s Office Crime Prevention and Control Unit and made another threat. I called up the reporter, who told me that she had been recently warned by the District Attorney’s Office. Naturally I called up the District Attorney’s Crime Prevention and Control Unit and asked the state trooper who received the call why he hadn’t bothered to contact me? He said he’d forgotten. He played stupid, but did promise to write a report, which took him six months.

In 2002, all of the drama finally came to a head. A Ryder rental truck had parked in front of a kickboxing club in East Falmouth. The operator had foolishly parked in front of one of Melvin Reine’s dumpsters. When Melvin drove up to empty his dumpster, he became enraged. He expressed his displeasure by lifting the parked rental truck up and down with the lift tines on his garbage truck — slamming it down with each repetition. After his anger had passed, Melvin realized he might be charged with the assault on the truck. He and his lawyer went to the front desk of the Falmouth Police Department to discuss the matter.  The duty sergeant promptly placed him under arrest. The judge presiding over Melvin’s arraignment became alarmed over the defendant’s preoccupation with how hard the courtroom benches were and remanded to the Bridgewater State Mental Hospital for psychiatric evaluation, then off to the Taunton State Mental Hospital. This time they found a bed. Twelve years later, while being held as criminally insane, Melvin died of Pick’s Disease.

The saga continued. In 2005, Shirley was found shot to death, ambushed in her garage. Melvin’s two sons were under investigation for the crime. No one has yet been charged. Around the time of her murder there was this revelation in the Cape Cod Times:


In a 2003 police report, Reine family members say Falmouth police officer Arthur Monteiro, who died in 1990, provided Reine with information about Busby’s routine before the shooting. He also gave Reine updates about the department’s investigation into the shooting, according to the report, which consists of Falmouth and state police interviews with Melvin Reine’s sons, Todd and Melvin Reine Jr., and his brother, John Reine

Arthur Monteiro was called Monty. He was a large Cape Verdean officer, whose eyes had the puffiness of being in the ring. I was told that the reason he was initially hired was that officers were sick of fighting him and wanted him on their side. He was also a Golden Gloves champion and our Cape Verdean chief of police’s brother-in-law.

Falmouth Police Department pays tribute to one undeserving officer

On May 17th, 2020, a commemorative service was held at a newly created memorial garden in front of the Falmouth Police Department. This garden features four monuments celebrating officers who have been singled out for their “Honor”, “Integrity”, “Commitment” and “Dedication”. You can see how things have changed since the night of that accident, when I was five years old and seated in my father’s faded navy blue,1952, Chevy.

Posted on by Dermot O'Sullivan

Rathfarnham – ‘Big House’ borderlands

“Bottle Tower, Rathfarnham”, by Harry Kernoff, RHA (1940) – built 1742 as a famine relief scheme after 1740/1741’s “Year of the Slaughter”
DERMOT O’SULLIVAN shows the secret history of a Dublin suburb

In university I did a module on Irish Literature which included ‘Big House’ novels. When I first heard the term, I thought it was a generic description of all novels connected to big country houses, whether they be set in Ireland or not. I mistakenly assumed that Castle Rackrent and The Last September were only Irish examples of a genre that included Jane Eyre, some of Austen’s works, perhaps Portrait of a Lady too.

I quickly discovered that this was not the case, that Big House novels are uniquely Irish works of literature concerned with the big houses of the Irish landlords and (usually) their relationship with the surrounding peasantry and politics of the time. In Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, we follow the declining fortunes of an incompetent and abusive Anglo-Irish landowning family, the not-so-subtly named Rackrents. The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen focuses on the cultural ambiguity and divided loyalties of an Anglo-Irish family during the Irish War of Independence, as they both hobnob with the members of the British army and demonstrate their sympathy for and connection with the local Irish, including those who are fighting for independence.

Elizabeth Bowen, who wrote of the ambiguities of Anglo-Irishness

These books made me suddenly curious − not about the literary genre itself − but about the social and historical reality that lay behind these works. I became intensely aware of the fact that people had actually lived in big houses, and – more importantly to my mind – around them, ordinary people existing in relation to these houses and what they represented. This may seem mind-numbingly obvious: after all, Irish history and popular culture is chock-full of stories about landlords and their tenants. However, there is a difference between knowing something and knowing something in italics, as the saying goes. And in thinking about the Big House novel and the world it sprang from, I was knowing in italics, for the first time, this strange, strange corner of Irish history.

This excited me, but left me a little disheartened, feeling I’d missed out on something important. It seemed strange and inappropriate for an Irish person not to know anything about a uniquely Irish reality that had given rise to a whole genre of literature. I was not a 18th or 19th Century peasant, nor ever would be. Neither was I the scion of some blue blood family that still spent summers in their crumbling mansion somewhere in rural Offaly or Meath. It was not that I wanted to be either of these people – not at all – but I was hungry to know this part of my country’s history.

I do not know how long this feeling lasted, a number of weeks perhaps. And then one day, while strolling by the enormous chestnut tree in the shadow of the castle, I realised how ridiculous this sense of historical deprivation was. After all, I had actually grown up in the grounds of a Big House!

Rathfarnham Castle (Photo: southdublinhistory.ie)

Remarkably this had completely slipped my mind as I mulled over the Big House novel. Rathfarnham Castle was of course a landlord’s Big House – arguably from its construction by Adam Loftus in the late 1500s and definitely from its refurbishment in the 18th Century – and the house in which I grew up in Rathfarnham Wood estate had been built on an old patch of the demesne gardens. I had spent my childhood playing in the woodlands of this Big House, climbing the exotic trees, sitting on the ornamental stone lions that flank its main entrance, hearing stories about its ghosts (including that of a girl bricked up in its walls), driving past its former entry gates, one by the village and the other down by the Dodder some distance away. Our “village” – with its newsagents, charity shops, pubs and takeaways − was the village that grew up around and serviced this house and castle.

How exciting and bizarre to think that a once powerful family’s garden was now occupied by dozens and dozens of individual families, squatting commoners far below the social and economic status of the historic Loftuses, but who nonetheless lived in a state of technological sophistication that the Loftuses could only have dreamed of. I briefly imagined I caught a glimpse of how Henry – the 18th century owner − may have viewed the sleepy (soporifically so) middle class housing estate where I grew up: a strange cyberpunk colony of unlanded plebeians who lacked even a simple chambermaid and yet, as a matter of course, rode mechanical horses fed by internal fires, ate for breakfast the foreign fruits that only he could afford or access in his time, and flew across and between continents in a matter of hours while casually watching probe footage from nearby planets on their handheld library-cum-galleries.   

I’d not only grown up on a former landlord estate (which is obviously extremely common anywhere in Ireland or indeed Europe), but within a stone’s throw of the house itself (which is also quite common, if less so). And, to top it all off, this was so unremarkable to me that I’d completely forgotten about it to the point of feeling sorry for myself, when it should have been the first thing I thought of on reading Edgeworth or Bowen. This now seemed to me far more interesting than any Big House reality from centuries ago.    

This realisation of course made history alive and immediate for me. It was not the first time I’d taken an interest in local history, or in history in general, topics that I’d always felt drawn to. But it certainly added more texture and impetus to this curiosity.

I had always adored – and still do – the nature of Rathfarnham Wood. And it was curious to know that where I had picked up my love of the natural world had been in the decadent and overgrown gardens of some long-departed landowning family. There was (and to a lesser extent still is) a sort of natural gothic to Rathfarnham Wood, with its shattered ruins and superabundance of ivy. It’s no doubt a common aesthetic taste, but I am sure that my obsession with ruins and overgrowth, and – the jackpot – overgrown ruins, was influenced by growing up in an environment that abounded in them.

Archbishop Loftus, constructor (or reconstructor) of Rathfarnham Castle

A short history of Rathfarnham I read many years ago, shortly after the events recounted above, described the area as a “waste village” in the early 1580s when Adam Loftus took possession and began the construction (or reconstruction) of Rathfarnham Castle. This simple phrase – with its hints of violence and war − stirred my curiosity and led to another novel insight into Irish history for me. I went on to read more about how Rathfarnham had been the frequent victim of Gaelic plundering. I had vaguely known about the raids of the O’Byrnes and O’Tooles before, and I’d of course heard ad nauseam in school about the Pale, the small area of Ireland surrounding Dublin that was still under the control of the English Crown in the 1300s. But it was only reading about Rathfarnham on this occasion that these facts really hit home.

It now seemed remarkable to me that the Wicklow highlands, so close to the centre of English power in the country, had remained Irish for so long. It took 400 years for English power to reach the hills and mountains that I could see out the window of my childhood home – and a further 200 for that control to be complete and uncontested. That’s 600 years total, more than the time that has elapsed since significant numbers of Europeans first set foot in the Americas. What’s more, these highlands are clearly visible from the city centre, and with good traffic, just 30 minutes away by car. Even back in medieval times they could only have been a few hours march distant at most. This was fascinating – the fact that two worlds co-existed side by side for so many centuries, the fact that in medieval times guards on the walls of Dublin Castle could have looked south at the hills and known that there lay another country: different language, different culture, different law.

That Rathfarnham was to some degree a borderland between these two realities, and would have witnessed these raids, was utterly engrossing to me. And the realisation that the expression “Beyond the Pale” literally applied to my neighbourhood (which straddled the Pale in fact, my house being inside it), that I could see “beyond the Pale” out the window of my redbrick suburban home, this was the icing on the historical cake.

Ticknock Forest, all too near Rathfarnham

Rathfarnham is a middle-class suburb located on the southern extremity of Dublin city, where the land begins to crumple into green hills that eventually give onto the granite Wicklow uplands and their rolling moors and peaks. At first glance it is an entirely unremarkable district. And at closer glance it is still quite unremarkable: suburban housing estates, main roads, shopping centres and parks. That’s basically it.

The parks – such as Rathfarnham Wood mentioned above – are the keys to understanding the neighbourhood’s history, as most of them are not recently developed urban parks, but the remains of the demesne gardens of wealthy, almost exclusively Protestant landowners. From the time of the English Reformation until Ireland’s Independence in 1922, the country was divided from its colonial overlords by religion, in addition to political and cultural questions. In essence, Ireland was ruled by a wealthy, landowning Protestant elite, much like in Britain, except in Ireland the vast majority of the population was Catholic (and extremely impoverished). Being close to the seat of English power in Dublin, Rathfarnham was greatly sought after by members of this class, and so the suburb boasts a high density of their mansions, giving the area an uncommon level of historical continuity when compared to many other areas of the city.

But all that comes much later: the history of Rathfarnham begins thousands of years before even Catholicism – not to mentioned Anglicanism – were even dreamed of. In the suburb − and particularly in its hilly, rural sections − are many millennia-old megaliths: cairns, tombs, dolmens, all left scattered by peoples whose languages, cultures and beliefs are utterly lost to the great bog of history. A Neolithic passage tomb recently excavated on Montpellier Hill probably dates back more than 5,000 years. Flint lithics, a polished stone axe head and a bone pin were found at the site. Another passage tomb cairn known as Fairy Castle is not actually in Rathfarnham, but is visible from the area as a grey nipple on the rounded summit of Two Rock mountain. The portion of Rathfarnham’s history that we can speak about with any degree of certainty – less than 1,000 years – pales in comparison to these deep stretches of time.  

There is not much to say about Rathfarnham before the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in the 12th Century, but we can safely assume that this fertile country, close to the River Liffey and Ireland’s east coast, would have been inhabited. There were early Christian monasteries nearby, with one possibly being located on the site of the old churchyard in Rathfarnham village. From the founding of Viking Dublin in the 9th Century, there was probably extensive Scandinavian presence in the area. But it is only after the Anglo-Norman invasion that we begin to have a solid written record of Rathfarnham. Incidentally, Diarmaid Mac Murchadha – the Irish king who brought the Anglo-Normans to the island in order to try regain his lost kingdom – led the invaders through the Rathfarnham area on the final leg of their march to attack Dublin, the most prosperous settlement in Ireland at the time. Ironically, seeing as it would take the English settlers hundreds of years to subdue the Wicklow mountains, it was through these uplands that they first entered the Dublin region, choosing this difficult route in order to surprise the city’s defenders. So in one of those strange rhyming reversals of history, the hills that for several centuries afterwards would be a thorn in the side of English Dublin, the vulnerable southern flank of the Pale from which would descend raiders and armies; these very same hills that would become their nemesis in the centuries ahead, are what allowed the Anglo-Normans to invade and occupy the city of Dublin in the first place.

Just five years later in 1175, Rathfarnham was granted by Henry II to Walter the goldsmith (aurifaber). Then in 1199, Milo le Bret was given Rathfarnham and constructed a motte and bailey fort in the area. This marked the beginning of the Pale period of Rathfarnham’s history mentioned above, when the district’s position at the edge of Dublin, right on the foothills of the Wicklow mountains, made it a cultural and military borderland for centuries. The precarious situation of Rathfarnham (and all the Pale’s southern border) became much more severe in the 1300s when Europe-wide famine and the Black Death, among other factors, led to a weakening of English power in Ireland, subjecting Dublin’s hinterland to ever more frequent and vicious raids from the O’Byrne and O’Toole clans from the mountains. Violence also went in the other direction, with the medieval records of Dublin showing the levying of forces to carry out attacks on the Gaelic kingdoms.

This cultural fault line was plagued by violence for another 200 years. Only in the 1580s was the power of the Gaelic lords finally broken. It was at this time that Rathfarnham was described as a “waste village” and that the original Loftus − Adam – was granted the lands and built the Castle that still exists today. Adam Loftus was a Yorkshire clergyman who managed to secure extensive wealth while in colonial service in Ireland. As well as being the man who built Rathfarnham Castle, he was Archbishop of Dublin and the first provost of Trinity College Dublin, which he helped to found and which was named after his alma-mater in Cambridge. He had a reputation for being a self-serving opportunist and apparently opposed the foundation of Trinity College in St Patrick’s Cathedral as it would have deprived him of a lucrative source of income. In any case, the fortified house that he built – and the village that grew to serve it – has remained the central historical feature of Rathfarnham to this day. And, of course, it is in the lands of this castle that the red-brick 1980s housing estate that I grew up in would be built, almost exactly 400 years later.  

In 1600, in an act of nostalgic violence, the Wicklow clans, taking advantage of the Nine Years’ War, attacked the castle. Letters of Adam Loftus from the time lament the loss of his cattle, sheep and other goods to the raiders. During the Irish Confederate Wars and Cromwellian invasion of the 1640s the castle changed hands many times and was occupied by both Royalists and Roundheads. There is a tradition that Cromwell himself stayed in the castle but no one knows if this is true.  

Cromwellian agitprop – the English warrior slays the Irish dragon

After peace came to Ireland in the late 1600s, a “golden era” (at least for some) began in Rathfarnham. The 18th Century was the height of the power and influence of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, a period when wealthy Protestants (some recent arrivals from England, others not) consolidated their control over the island. These landlords owned vast estates across the entire country, while Catholics had their rights restricted under various, ever-changing Penal Laws. It was from this landowning class that came the writers Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Bowen, and it was from the social reality of this elite’s status in Irish society that came the Big House novel genre. In Rathfarnham this contrast would probably have been less fraught, as ordinary peasants living close to Dublin would have been less obviously impoverished and less obviously “Irish” than those elsewhere in the country.

In any case, it is at this time that were built most of the large, extant and historically relevant structures in Rathfarnham: Rathfarnham House, The Hermitage, the Church of Ireland church in the village, Eden House (now a pub), Marlay House, the Priory (later demolished) and other less extravagant homes.

Just as significant was the refurbishment by Lord Ely (Henry Loftus) of Rathfarnham Castle, which converted the 16th Century fortified house into a luxurious modern home, complete with rococo ceilings, painted glass windows and other decorative features. Perhaps most tellingly, the Castle’s windows were enlarged to a size that would have been unthinkable in the era of the Wicklow clans’ incursions. But this was a new era for Rathfarnham, when security was no longer a great concern.

Lord Ely’s Gate, formerly the main entrance to the Rathfarnham Castle demesne

Funnily enough, approximately 250 years later an “attack” by another group of outsiders – probably some drunken roughs from another area of the city that had gate-crashed a party nearby –would result in some of these windows being smashed and a return to a state of  high vigilance at the castle. Motion sensors and cameras were installed to defend the place, instead of the more traditional armed watchmen of centuries past.

With increased freedom for the majority of Irish following Catholic Emancipation in 1829, Rathfarnham underwent another interesting shift that mirrored the social and political changes taking place across the country. From this time until Irish independence in 1922, the big structures of Rathfarnham were increasingly occupied by Catholic institutions as the power of the Protestant Ascendancy began to wane. Rathfarnham House became the Loreto convent (where Mother Teresa of Calcutta trained). The Hermitage became St Enda’s School, or Scoil Éanna, a bilingual Catholic school under the direction of Pádraig Pearse, the man who later led the 1916 Rising, which though a military failure led to the conflict that eventually saw Ireland gain independence from Britain. And the Castle itself became a Jesuit college and retreat centre. During this period the Church of the Annunciation Catholic church was built, there having been only a small mass house before.

Rathfarnham’s final transformation (and probably its last for the foreseeable future) came in the mid to late 20th century, when Dublin’s suburban sprawl spread to what had been a populated but still largely rural district. Many housing estates were built, including the one I grew up in. Shopping centres, schools, pubs and other services sprung up to attend to the needs of the new inhabitants. And now that is what Rathfarnham is: an area of suburban housing estates scattered with old Ascendancy mansions, or perhaps an area of stately Ascendancy parklands now occupied by suburban homes. It all depends on your perspective.           

So where does this leave us? Ultimately, for most of its residents, with a suburb that they can live in and its local parks that they can jog in, or play football in, or drink in at night when they are still underage. Rathfarnham is a place that holds a lot of physical history: there are few places in the whole country with such a high density of old buildings and ruins, particularly from relatively recent times, but also from extremely distant eras. However, buildings do not have memory, people do, and in this way Rathfarnham is a paradox, as while many old structures have persisted through the ages here, its people have not. In recent decades, this has been due to the explosion of suburban growth: the residents of the housing estates of Rathfarnham are mostly not from the area and a huge number are not from Dublin at all. As such there is little of the folk memory and interrelations that exist in parts of rural Ireland. And none of the big houses are occupied by their original residents.

Before this, Rathfarnham had its cultural continuity disrupted by the Viking and Anglo-Norman invasions and subsequent settlement. One thinks of the late, great Tim Robinson’s exceptional books on the Aran Islands and Connemara (Stones of Aran – Pilgrimage, Stones of Aran – Labyrinth, and the Connemara Trilogy – Listening to the Wind, The Last Pool of Darkness and A Little Gaelic Kingdom) how − though these were disappearing even as he recorded them – names existed for individual rocks and hummocks in the land; and how there were folk tales and traditions associated with individual cliff faces and bogs and bays. In Rathfarnham, this is almost non-existent, and entirely so for the vast majority of residents these days. One thinks of the local names and stories and traditions that must have existed here over the centuries, in English more recently, and further back in the Irish language itself.

This cultural dislocation is perhaps illustrated most clearly in the name of the place: no one knows exactly where the name Rathfarnham comes from. All that is certain is that it originates in a time when Gaelic culture would have been ascendant in the area. The Irish Ráth Fearnáin is usually translated as Fearnán’s ringfort, but even this is debated. And, even assuming this is correct, no one knows who Fearnán was or – though there are educated guesses − exactly where his ráth lay. The English form obviously alters the last syllable to make it similar to British place names such as Birmingham or Nottingham. This would be like renaming Castledermot in county Kildare, “Castledertown.” And if we translate ráth loosely as “castle” (on the logic that both were the central defensive structures of their respective cultures), the strange disjunction of this cultural forgetting becomes even clearer, as it would mean that Rathfarnham Castle, the central point of the neighbourhood, can be construed as the tautological “The Castle of the Castle of Fearnán,” which makes zero sense, or all the sense in the world. Again, it all depends of your perspective.

Study for the Head of Samuel Beckett, by Louis de Broquy – the Anglo-Irish analyst of states of mind depicted like a Celtic warrior

Exploring the history of Rathfarnham (or anywhere perhaps) is akin to psychoanalysis, insofar as what is most interesting and revelatory is usually not the discovery of something completely unknown, but rather the coming to awareness of things that were clearly there all along. In the case of Ireland, one theme is the ambiguity of our attachment to the relics of a colonial past, animosity towards which – for lack of other things, much of our native culture having been destroyed – is a fundamental part of the country’s national identity. For all the reasons outlined above, Rathfarnham embodies this starkly, it being a seat of both Protestant ascendancy and nationalist revolution. With its completely obliterated Gaelic past, and its colonial history remaining only in the repurposed or ruined shells of old buildings, Rathfarnham is ultimately the unremarkable embodiment of a clash of cultures that began 850 years ago and which continues to this day.

Unremarkable as, in the final analysis, this story is repeated all over the island, and is simply another way of defining the idea of Ireland itself, whether one lives on the grounds of a literal Big House or not. And as much as battles and rebellions, this clash is equally well represented by a modern, health-conscious suburbanite jogging in an ornamental parkland planted by a colonial landlord long, long ago.