Mandy Baldwin's Blog

Control of words doesn’t just inhibit speech, it inhibits imagination, and thought itself. The content which is approved can actually be foul, because morals and decency don’t come into it. It is about control, and the eradication of any whose speech indicates that they are not afraid.

And already, just by writing that paragraph, I know I will have triggered those who think that the elimination of differing views is a moral duty as well as a personal pleasure.

I am writing in the week in which presenter Piers Morgan was vindicated by Ofcom, the independent broadcasting standards body, for daring to disagree with Meghan Markle.
Over fifty thousand people had bayed for his blood for this ‘crime’ – including Markle herself, who used her position to personally contact Morgan’s employers and demand that he be fired.

Ofcom described as “chilling” the notion that any public figure should be considered above criticism, or that any point of view should be the only point of view permitted.

It is indeed chilling, but it is the norm now, and, heart-warming as it is that Ofcom support free debate, I am equally chillingly certain that Markle, and her witch-hunters, will, as I write, be busying themselves in finding ‘inappropriate’ Tweets, or off-the-cuff comments made in the hearing of an informer, to unleash screeching hysteria upon, and fire all of those who reached this decision.
That, too, is now the norm. 

It was so refreshing to see a chink of light in the silent darkness, that I decided to investigate other episodes of Piers Morgan speaking out. 
After all, since he left his job – refusing to make a grovelling apology for having a personal opinion – figures for the show he dominated have plummeted to an embarrassing, all-time low. 
Clearly, by being willing to speak freely, he spoke for millions – even those who didn’t agree with him.

I found dozens, but I will post just three at the bottom of this piece, and if you want to see what witch-hunters look like in the 21st century, then you need look no further than these. 

What stays with me most, after watching them, is the exchange between two women, one insisting that certain words, people and phrases are not now necessary.

Really? Says who? And how far does she extend this, as she basks in the satisfaction of having ruined a blameless life? Who else, and what else, may become “unnecessary” in her judgement?
What’s more, she bizarrely assumes that “we all agree” she is right – which is positively psychopathic.

The other began by defending free speech, but suddenly realised that because she had spoken out, the witch-hunt against her would commence unless she was suitably conciliatory. There was real fear in her face. The gimlet-eyed witch-hunter was clearly planning to release the hounds on her, and she knew it.

I am also writing in a week in which laughter, as well as words, has taken a hit.  76 year old Roy Chubby Brown has been banned from performing in Sheffield, despite tickets selling out.

I don’t happen to find Brown funny – but that is not the point.  Performers should not be cancelled by either witch-hunt or edict.

Even more chilling is the case of Janey Godley, the Scottish comedian who had signed up to take part in the Scottish campaign to encourage the wearing of masks, and lateral flow Covid testing, and had arranged to give her fee to a children’s charity – but has now been publicly shamed and stripped from the campaign, due to someone having the time and inclination to dig up some “offensive” Tweets from over a decade ago.

At least, they are stated to be offensive, but since nobody will actually show what they contain, who knows whether they actually are? 

Godley made her name parodying SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, a woman who has now instituted prison-sentences of up to seven years for people saying “offensive” things in their own homes, so she probably has a sense of humour – and sense of personal power – much akin to those of Stalin.

What really made my blood run cold in this case, was the awful, self-abasing apology which Godley made, which was along the lines of the Nazi show-trials adjudicated by Roland Friesler (Google him if you want nightmares) – the final, public degradation before the “offender” was executed anyway.

Who is it, who can be bothered to devote themselves to wiping out any opinion other than their own? I will call them Woke, because that is what everyone who is not them, calls them. 

They hold power of speech or silence over us all, although judging by the truth of the phrase “go woke, go broke”, they are in direct opposition to the beliefs of the vast majority of us.  They demand to be the future, although they resemble, in their tyrannical elitism, a Medieval monarch.

These are people, this is an ethos, which wants its opponents to die: socially, financially, mentally, emotionally, preferably physically, since that is often the result of being robbed of everything else. 
For such people, and such an ethos, to in any way claim the moral high-ground, is a surreal distortion of truth.

The truth is that there are as many opinions as there are people, but Woke has nothing to do with Truth.

What we are seeing now, is fascism – being practiced by those who accuse any who oppose them, of that very thing. 

A free speaker, thinker, writer, artist, is not “fascist” as long has he or she permits others to be free. Anyone who denies the rights of others to freedom is fascist, because fascism is defined by its authoritarian suppression of opposition.

No matter which side of the political fence someone claims to be, if they practice the authoritarian suppression of opposition, they bear the hall-mark of fascism. (For the record, those who studied history before it was Woke-ified know that both Hitler, and Mussolini, described themselves as ‘socialist’.)

The trouble is, history has also been cancelled, seeing famous, beloved historians such as Starky and Oliver driven beyond the Woke Wall because an interest in history is ‘problematic’. 
History involves a forensic examination of the past, and who knows what the historian might unearth?

One thing which might be ‘problematic’, is excavating the Enlightenment, which can be defined by the phrase “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
This phrase was never actually uttered by philosophe Voltaire, but was the gist of his writing, for which he was imprisoned and persecuted.
The elite of his day, too, found free speech “offensive”.

Examining the fifty year, astoundingly expensive British campaign against slavery, which involved loss of British lives, and taking out loans which we were repaying until 2014, would also knock the Woke narrative for six.

Naturally, as well as the risk of revealing the good intentions and achievements of people who the Woke want to erase, and therefore inevitably damaging the narrative of anti-European-anti-American-anti-Anglosphere-anti-white hatred which is a prerequisite of being Woke,  an examination of more recent history would certainly expose what happens when people are categorised according to race and sexuality, a practice which is a Woke obsession.

Far from agreeing with Martin Luther King that civilised humans should value the content of a character rather than the colour of a skin, the Woke practically hold people up to a Dulux colour-chart to assess their worth.
Complete any form now, and you will find that someone, somewhere, will want on record your race, religion, and sexuality.

Why? There have previously been only three ‘regimes’ under which these things were considered valid for registration – Nazi-occupied Europe, Apartheid South Africa, and the pre-Civil Rights southern states of America.

And now – to what should be our eternal shame: Woke Britain.

In a civilised, tolerant society, race is irrelevant, religion is free, sexuality is personal. But to the Woke, categorising human beings is of vital importance for the manipulation of society, robbing people of their common humanity and shared values, a practice of creating divisions rather than encouraging the unity Woke pretend to espouse.

Woke like to describe themselves as Left Wing, but they bear no relation to the old Labour Party of which I, and four generations of my family, were members.

Woke like to say that the fascists of the 1930s and 1940s were Right Wing, when in fact the word “Nazi” is an abbreviation of the name of Hitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party – and Mussolini began his career as a school-teacher, who wrote for a Socialist newspaper.
It was the free-thinkers of the Socialist camp who were eradicated by the fascists – just as they are now, by the Woke.

Woke like to deny their fascism, by claiming that libertarianism – the usual position of what today describes itself as Right Wing – is fascism.

In fact, a Libertarian is defined as “an advocate or supporter of civil liberties and of a political philosophy that advocates only minimal state intervention in the free market and the private lives of citizens,” whereas fascists practiced the categorisation of individuals according to race and sexuality, along with absolute social control, and the authoritarian suppression of alternative viewpoints.

Ring any Woke bells?

I doubt Orwell’s 1984 would find a publisher now, but the lack of self-awareness among the Woke is so astonishing, that I equally doubt that they ever recognise their behaviour in the line “the truth was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.”

However, each of us who has been vilified for defying the Woke, fully understands this, from the same author: “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”

The publishing industry itself, which once fought to publish forbidden books, is now Woke; numerous authors who have been well-established for years, have now had to self-publish because some needle-nosed little dictator detected a modicum of rebellion and harassed their publisher.

I find that I am less and less interested in reading a newly traditionally-published novel, because I know it will have passed the Woke-o-meter, and will therefore be as compliant with Woke fascism as those who performed in the propaganda-laden historical dramas of Josef Goebbels. 

On this blog, I often reminisce about my family, and I realise that, although they were thoroughly decent people, these days they would be hounded, silenced and vilified simply for being themselves. 

They were white, working-class, old-school Labour-voters, intelligent, fairly well-read, law-abiding, patriotic, proud of their achievements, tolerant, good-humoured and colour-blind.  They were people who others turned to in a crisis, and they thought that kindness, courage, common-sense and stoicism were virtues.  They were strangers to self-pity and believed in counting their blessings. 

They thought, quite rightly, that everyone was entitled to their say and anyone who bossed others around was a know-all and an interfering busy-body. 
They believed that Social Justice involved everyone having a vote, and ensuring that there were affordable homes, secure jobs, free health-care, and a good education for every child, provided by teachers who kept to their subject, and kept their politics to themselves.

They would have thought that a teacher who so much as considered a child’s sexuality, was a pervert. And they would have thought that people who spend their life inventing difficulties, defining categories, and imagining grievances, have too much time on their hands, and should go and do something useful. 

They were everything Woke want to eradicate and, I have tears in my eyes as I write this, I find, more and more, that I am glad they didn’t live to see what has been done to the world they thought they had made safe and free for their grandchildren’s grandchildren.

Don’t think you will ever be Woke enough, if you are capable of any independent thought whatsoever.  It is impossible, because the boundaries of what offends depend on the whim of the Woke elite.

This is why even JK Rowling – not only vastly wealthy and famous, but previously considered vastly Woke herself – has had death threats, and why her publisher has received hysterical demands to drop her from their lists. 

J K Rowling didn’t curtail her imagination sufficiently.  The world’s most successful living author, who has toed the line at all times, dared to write without consulting the very latest diktat.

The irony is that in that regard, J K Rowling now falls into the same category as Tommy Robinson, who also receives death threats and shrieking demands for the removal of his books from Amazon. 
Freedom is freedom, and those who are robbing the world of words, in order to reshape thought in their own image, make no distinction between the books they wish to burn.

What matters to them, is that they control words, thoughts, imagination, the very heart and soul of an individual, without which, the individual ceases to exist, becoming as meaningful as a stuffed toy which squawks all the right phrases repetitively when its string is pulled.  

If you love words, if you love to immerse yourself in a book, then you need to defend even those words and books you dislike, because their very existence, out there in the big, wide world, is a declaration of your own right to be whoever you are.

Winston Churchill – voted Greatest Briton, and one who Woke definitely want to erase – said “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” And so it is each time you try to please the Woke by whittling away at your choice of words, hand-cuffing your mind and soul, little by little, in order to avoid being their target.

You are never safe from the Woke, if you actually exist.  Sooner or later, you will put a foot wrong: laugh at a joke which contains a forbidden word, or like the wrong comment, or post a news article from the wrong source.

Sooner or later, you will not raise your arm high enough, not scream hatred of freedom loud enough, not label yourself and others correctly, not be obsessed enough with the latest authorised script.

The Woke are watching.

If they can come for J K Rowling, they are definitely coming for you.

(1484) Are We Too Easily Offended? | Good Morning Britain – YouTube
(1484) Piers Loses It Over Sexist ‘Handbags’ Comment Debate | Good Morning Britain – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDI6j0pH87k

https://mandybaldwinwriterblog.wordpress.com/

You know when you watch an historical drama, and the characters look like people you could meet any day, but you know you are watching a world long gone and irretrievable? It’s like that now, seeing films and TV shows where people meet in bars and restaurants and shake hands, and get into each other’s cars, or visit each other’s homes.

It’s been less than three months since lock-down began, but already it is as hard to imagine ever being able to spend time with acquaintances without the fear that they may be carrying disease, death and doom, as it is to picture living in Jane Austen’s world of corsets, propriety, and swooning at the brief touch of hands in a formal dance. In fact, the entire small world outside our doors has, for those of us who remain safely indoors for fear of spreading or catching Covid-19, taken on elements of unreality: I can only imagine the sense of dangerous excitement which will attend a small, once-everyday activity such as posting a parcel. Our worlds, which once seemed fathomless, have shrunk to the size of our living space. But within that small space, we experience whole lives – and these days, these worlds hold terrors previously relegated to historical drama.

Quite apart from those who catch the virus itself, there are those who are condemned, seemingly without end, to live with pain and sickness which used to be – and still should be – treatable. And they must now do that without even the distraction of the sun on their faces or a visit from friends – while those who love them are imprisoned, unable to reach out and hold them, forced only to send what comfort we can through inadequate words.

What we all have, ultimately, is ourselves, and all we have to draw on is whatever spiritual strength we can muster. I would bet that more prayers have been sent over the past three months, than have been sent for three decades.

Buddhists believe that only the moment exists – that fear and hope are imagination, and technically this is true. But humans have the capacity to dream: it’s what we do. We plan our lives each day based on a combination of hope and fear. And if both are imagination, then we have one simple choice – whether we live in hope or travel in fear. We can picture a better tomorrow, or we can dread the worst. Trapped in a small here-and-now, like flies in amber, we can cling to what small power remains to us – power over our own experience of that small world, and what dreams or nightmares we indulge in. Of course, there are those who believe that hope is delusion, that it is more rational to assume the worst. But then, if only the moment exists, fear is a delusion, too – amd studies have shown that only 10% of what we fear will happen, actually happens. So who is delusional here – the person who, in the moment, chooses to be happy: or the person who chooses to be right?

As for living in the moment, people used to be taught to count their blessings, and then that went out of style. Yes: if there is a real problem which you can do something about, to sit doing nothing about it is quite silly – but if you can’t change a thing, then you might as well think about counting blessings, as sit around hating the world and all who sail in it.

Counting blessings involves noticing the small things which are left to us in our small worlds: the sunlight on a patch of carpet, birds in a tree outside a window, the smell of clean laundry, or fresh coffee, changing weather viewed from shelter, a warm bath, a cat playing with a ball, a joke on social media which makes you laugh out loud, time to read a book you shelved for months, finding something you had thought lost, in a cupboard you never had the time to clear, the taste of buttered toast, a call from someone who loves you. All these things are a candle lit in the night – and, being in the moment, they are most definitely real.

The fact of the matter is, the people for whom things turn out the best, are those who make the best of the way things turn out.

In the end, for all our pretensions of power, when faced with what we can’t change, survival boils down to the capacity to endure, and to look for the light at the end of the tunnel, which does exist, even if it is a pin-prick in the darkness right now. This time will end like every other time, and we will meet again.

Stay well.

They found the diaries in open view on the rickety brown book-shelf in the little upstairs flat in Shepherd’s Bush. Plain navy covers, nothing special to look at, but my mother and my aunts were fascinated, and the Oldest Sister, pulling stripes of family rank, put them in her handbag, glancing over her shoulder to see if Grandad had noticed. In fact, he was in the kitchen, looking for biscuits in the big, round tin which was where it always was, on the table next to the tea-pot.

I could see everything from my perch on the shiny hard sofa with its anti-Macassars: the sisters moving from shelf to shelf, picking up pieces of china and putting them down again, waiting for the boxes to arrive which would consign ninety years of life to neat parcels in the past.

Without understanding the mechanics of it, I could have told Grandad – who was, incredibly enough, Great Grandad’s little boy – that there would be no more biscuits in that round tin and the old stained tea-pot would never steam again.

I was four years old then, and I knew Great Grandad was gone, but didn’t know where or how. This was his space and although still full of the things he had gathered around him, the heart of it had gone.

It was like when I found my rabbit, Sooty, lying flat and still in his hutch, no more flat and still than when he was sleeping – but I knew without trying to wake him, he was gone.

The flat was dead now. The traffic still buzzed in the road below, but the rooms no longer hummed with the noise of living, which had been there even when Great Grandad wasn’t speaking which was, to be honest, a rare occurrence.

What I saw when I thought of when the flat was living, was sunlight spilling on the little kitchen floor and around the table, and on hard chairs which made my bottom numb, sat me, my brother, and Great Grandad, his shock of white hair lit like a halo above arched eyebrows and the blue eyes he had bequeathed to my mother.

He poured us brick-red tea which was too bitter to drink despite six spoons of sugar, and my brother and I ate all the biscuits while Great Grandad pulled up the old sash window and shouted at somebody in the street.

I heard a woman’s thin voice from far below, say: “Open the door – we have a nice hot dinner for you!” but Great Grandad shouted back to her, and slammed the window shut, and I didn’t know why my brother was laughing, rolling on the floor laughing, because I was too young to know what “Fuck off with your hot dinners!” meant.

As the flat was dead now, it seemed there was little that anyone wanted to keep – perhaps because so little in it had mattered to Great Grandad. His little boy – my Grandad – said that all he wanted were the two suitcases from under his father’s bed, which was still rumpled from when the ambulance men took Great Grandad away on his last journey.

In the end, the Uncles brought three big boxes up the steep stairs from the little hallway, but only one was needed, and at the top of the stairs, they turned out the light there, and Great Grandad became part of the past.

From then on, there was a vase on the mantelpiece at home which was our memento of him, Victorian, like Great Grandad himself, in burnished browns and golds, a painting of an improbable sunset over mountains, and the word ‘Sontag’.

But what mattered to the sisters were the diaries, and what they imagined would be written there.

There were seven of them – each with the year neatly painted in some white stuff on the cover – 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945.

What revelations the sisters had expected, from these seven of his ninety years! Great Grandad had had an opinion on everything, and never ceased to share it, so maybe they expected some thoughts about the war; or maybe, as my mother, the most imaginative of the trio, thought, the Big Secret of his break with his wealthy family to marry the sweet, piano-teacher daughter of Gentleman Jim, disreputable artist and drunk, would have been written there.

Great Grandad had written an entry every single day, beginning on 3rd September 1939. But their hopes of epic revelations were dashed: every day, in neat copperplate, he had written the letters JJJ – the initials of his three Christian names, Josephus James John – followed by a brief note of the weather, and the phase of the moon. So these, the sisters said, sighing, were the reflections of their grandfather on vast world events. The diaries ceased to be mentioned – and I don’t know where they are now.

Fast forward twenty-five years, to when my own grandfather went to meet his fathers both earthly and heavenly.

Again, the sisters went to empty an old man’s flat, and again, very little was retrieved. The gold watch and chain he’d worn went to my oldest cousin, and there were some books, and small ornaments which had been buried in dust since my grandmother died. But my brother and I, being curious, each chose to keep one of the two suitcases which had been retrieved all those years ago from under Great Grandad’s bed.

They were battered, cheap, brown cardboard, and locked, but they rattled when shaken, and one afternoon, as my new baby for who this would all be history, slept in her pram, my brother managed to break the locks.

I had chosen the one which had a single white paw-print on it, from when some long-dead cat had obviously bothered a house-painter. It wasn’t full, but what was there was intriguing: some small metal objects, some wire, some old black and white photographs of people I didn’t know, in places I didn’t recognise, an envelope addressed to a London street long bombed to smithereens, and some post-cards with cryptic messages, sent from European countries.

One, a picture of the famous Mannekin Pis statue in Brussels, dated 25th August 1939, and addressed to that long-dead London street, was franked in Brussels, and the message, in the same beautiful copperplate of the diaries, read: Remember to feed the geese before midnight.

Most surprising, a picture of the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin, franked with the Swastikas of Nazi Germany – sent again to that London street – bore the message: The night-shift starts early on Wednesday.

It was dated 31st August 1939 – the day before German troops invaded Poland.

Born and bred Londoner Josephus James John never fed a goose in his life, and what night-shift he was referring to remains a mystery. And we never did trace the address in London.

But why was this sixty-year-old night-school teacher on ‘holiday’ in Europe on the brink of disaster, and above all, what was JJJ doing in Berlin, the day before the catastrophe of WW2 was triggered?

It must be said that JJJ was a man of varied interests. Losing his teaching post along with his family when he chose to stay with his wife and child rather than return to the comfortable fold, he found work as a train-driver. But he continued teaching, after a fashion, at evening classes: he taught Esperanto, deciphering, and short-hand. He compiled cross-word puzzles for newspapers, and learned to speak idiomatic French from refugees.

If the contents of my suitcase were intriguing, what we found in my brothers’ was astonishing.

French occupation coins from 1942, papers – which would have fooled anyone, and apparently did – ‘proving’ that JJJ was a native of three different towns in Normandy and – most exciting of all, a recipe, which at first we thought might be for the most disgusting cake ever made, but which contained items which in combination were explosive, made out of the kind of ingredients which I assume could be found in many households of the time.

The diaries, with the painstaking record of the skies and the phases of the moon, fell into place: JJJ was using the skills of his life, to fight for his country, in occupied Europe.

I didn’t know much about groups like SOE, and I had no computer at the time, but I took my two small children, and my new baby, to the library, and did my research into organisations formed of ‘ordinary’ people who were each in their way extraordinary, having unique skill sets which put them outside the box in everyday life, but made them valuable members of war-time operations.

What I also learned was that membership of these groups was covered by the Official Secrets Act, and therefore, anyone who disclosed their membership to anyone – even their spouse – faced the death penalty.

So JJJ’s suitcases, locked and gathering dust, his mysterious disappearances during those years, his heroism – he clearly worked in occupied France, where the average life-span of an operative was three months – all remained unexplained and unsung.

But not inexplicable. He had children, and grandchildren, and before he died, he had great-grandchildren, too. And those who defend their country against foreign incursion, by whatever means available to them, do it from love of their children, so as to bequeath to them the freedoms they win, along with the colour of their eyes.

When I was four years old, I thought that he was gone. But half a century later, I can remember his voice, telling me not to be afraid, and I can see the splash of sunshine on the flat walls. And tucked away safely, where one day my own grandchildren and great grandchildren will find it, is a suitcase hinting at dramas which are the stuff of legend now.

I believe that people who love and are loved gain immortality.

I don’t know what JJJ had to do, in the cause of freedom. Maybe it wasn’t pretty. Those hands which poured my bitter tea into the cup-and-saucer which were too big for me to handle, would probably have been trained to kill, and each time he “disappeared” he would have known that maybe, this time, it was the last goodbye…and had to pretend it wasn’t, certain that nobody would ever know that he was more than just an everyday hero.

And what he did, he did for love.

Every conversation ended with me being told: don’t go out. Stay under cover. Keep in touch. Are you somewhere sheltered?

People in houses are kind to people in tents, and show it in online messages which make a small world wider.

“You should be OK,” said someone. “It’s going to flatten Ireland, first.”

The wind rattled the hedge above me, then stopped as if breathlessly waiting for something bigger to come along, just as I waited, having hammered in extra tent pegs, and put heavy stones along the door, which tends to gape, so the tent inflates, exhales, inflates again – a breathing blue lung.

I’ve survived storms before, so I prepared for a long night. I’ve learned that living close to nature doesn’t make me a force of it, and there is only so much I can do to fend it off. If the lung bursts, or is blown away, while it’s a disaster for me and the little crew here, there’s no malice intended. In any case, wasn’t Ophelia busy flattening Ireland?

It was getting towards late afternoon, and she certainly wasn’t bothering me here, in Pevensey – no more than a few playful slaps and tickles at the tent.

I noticed the silence, first: the lack of bird-song. Then the tent was briefly dark as a cloud of small birds met over it, and clung together to the hawthorn behind me, screaming and chattering. Outside, I could see gulls walking, silent, massed, distorted by the plastic window. They tilted silver eyes at me. Hitchcock never created more menace than my imaginings about their beaks and claws versus my blue lung.

For a few heartbeats we all waited, then Ophelia arrived – not vicious, but a warm strong wind under a sky the colour of dirty mustard, and every tiny bird and gull lifted as one into the air and went wherever birds go when their element goes crazy.

Against the flapping of the tent and the gathering roar from the west, came a Skype call:

“Seen the sky? Sahara dust and forest fires blown here by the storm.”

And after a day spent preparing to sit tight, suddenly I had to be out, under a sky blown in from Africa. I crossed the road to where I expected the sea to be angry. But the tide was out, and the sky was orange as marmalade, unreal, reflected in the ridged sand below water-colour layers of mist and black and white clouds, low over far-off receding dunes and hills.

I thought: “I’ve never seen anything like this before, in all my life, and I’ll never see it again.”

Then the wind grew stronger, more punch than slap, and I thought about my little blue tent, and safety. There was a man there on the sea-wall with me, watching the sky, and before I turned away I wanted to ask him if, like me, he felt as if he’d walked into a Chinese silk painting, and if he, too, wouldn’t have missed it for the world – but I didn’t, because we don’t ask that kind of thing of strangers, do we?

But there are storms and there are storms, and if Ophelia was as graceful here as the name suggests, Brian is a thug.

For one thing, Brian sent his little brother round late Thursday night, and in the early hours of the morning, he ripped a hole in the side of Bletchley, big enough for Hemingway to walk through. I packed everything ready for a swift evacuation, put an umbrella over OscarWildecat (who didn’t appear to care about the storm at all) and sat shivering until it was light, and I could carry out repairs.

The hole is gone, but so is one vital seam of the tent – and so are all my patching materials. And so is the illusion of safety here, because I know from my experience when somebody slashed my tent in the spring, Bletchley’s days are now numbered, would be even if, as I am writing this, Storm Brian wasn’t beating us from side to side, the blue walls which have sheltered us for months suddenly seeming fragile as a cobweb.

Brian arrived in a wall of black sky, a raging bellow, and a sudden loosing of rain which felt like cold gravel thrown at my back as I bent to replace the guy-ropes torn out by the wind last night.

There will be no trips to the sea wall today – I can hear the sea, and it’s not in the mood for visitors.

It’s hard to see how we can survive this storm, and harder to see how we can survive the winter, which will follow close on the heels of the storm season, and is predicted to be the harshest in decades. I have around two weeks to find better shelter.

I’ve learned to deal with the day, along with all the other lessons learned during this time which I never thought I’d have to live. But now and then I glimpse the immediate future.. and I wonder if I will get the chance to put those lessons to use at all.

https://authorsama.amafeed.com/writer-goes-roaming-ask-me-833275

Hunger was Julia’s strongest memory of childhood. She was born in 1938, so she had known nothing else. There wasn’t much in the shops to show for her Mum queuing for hours. Weekly bought rations were: 1oz cheese; 1 egg; 4 oz bacon or ham. Scrawny chickens scratched at the end of the garden, poor layers on a diet of grit and snails, but better than nothing. What they could make for themselves was what kept them fed.

Oliver, her brother, made his contribution by converting every available speck of earth into vegetables, saving the seeds for next harvest. From scraps of wood scavenged by fair means or foul from bomb-sites he made rabbit hutches which lined the garden fence; Julia’s job was to forage for weeds to feed the rabbits, ranging far afield, her arms full of groundsel and dandelions, while her sister Margaret picked fruit, blackberries, rose-hips, crab apples, anything which seemed ripe and grew wild, to make into jam.

Mum would roast the rabbits, then stew the left-overs, then mash it with turnips for rissoles, then make soup from the bones.

On leave from the navy, one of Julia’s uncles brought her a banana. She had seen

pictures of them, but never held one. Afraid to break it, she sat on the wall outside the house and held it to her mouth, without peeling it. Like bees, a small group of children with identical pinched faces gathered watchfully.

“Is it real?” said one boy, breathing heavily through his nose, never taking his eyes from the fruit.

Julia nodded. “Our Uncle Joe brought it back with him.”

She peeled the banana as Uncle Joe had instructed her, nonchalantly ignoring her

audience. Not knowing quite what to do with it now, she sucked the fruit, and around her, stomachs growled.

“Can I ‘av a bit?” asked the boy, and Julia shook her head, worried that the

movement might damage the banana.

Having created the sensation, she went back indoors and hid the banana under the bed, out of Margaret and Oliver’s reach. The next day, although the banana was blackened, she sat on the wall again, proud of her possession, and the same hungry group gathered admiringly.

“Is it another one, Julia?” they asked, and she nodded, proud of her Uncle who could supply them with exotic fruit.

By the fourth day, the banana was frankly horrible looking; black and slimy, and not fit to show to her audience – so she finally ate it.

On that leave, Uncle Joe had also brought a special present for Julia’s mother – a jar of rainbow-coloured sweets, just like the ones in Julia’s Enid Blyton story book.

Mum kept the jar in the bathroom, Julia supposed because it was the only place she was ever alone, and she’d want to savour the sweets on her own. They were beautiful sweets, too – shaped like little hearts.

So, greatly daring, one morning when Mum was downstairs and Margaret and Oliver

were out, she stole into the bathroom and opened the jar. The smell was delightful. It was like the kitchen when the jam was boiling. She shovelled three of the heartshaped sweets into her mouth and chewed. Suddenly her eyes watered and she gagged. Her mouth was foaming and she couldn’t breathe.

“Mum! Mum!” she sputtered through the rainbow-coloured, fruit-scented froth, and

her mother came running from the kitchen.

At a glance she saw what had happened, and bent Julia’s neck over the bathroom

basin, washing her mouth out with cold water, and drying her tears.

“Hinny, hinny – they’re for going in the bath, they’re soap, not for eating!”

And then, to her surprise, instead of being angry, Mum knelt on the floor, clutched the frail body of her daughter to her and sobbed as if her heart would break.

Not all the hunger in the world, though, could make the children eat Donald Duck.

One day, their father came home from work with something wrapped in his

handkerchief, and placed it carefully in Julia’s opened palms. It was a blue egg, warm and sweet-smelling. Julia sniffed it.

“Shall we eat it, Dad?” she asked.

“No, pet. I want you to keep this nice and warm, all the time. One day soon, it’ll be a duckling. Then it’ll be a big duck. Then we’ll eat it.”

Julia took his instructions seriously. She put the egg inside her petticoat and kept it there, peering at it now and then, and feeling it to check it had not cooled. At night, in bed with Margaret, she could hardly sleep for fear she would damage the shell. When called to shelter or table, the egg was there. Held between her bony chest and her

darned woollen sweater, the egg waxed strong. One day, there was movement from

within, and Julia took it to show her brother and sister.

Margaret and Oliver watched as the outsize yellow bill tapped a hole in the shell.

Julia’s thin brown fingers picked away and enlarged the hole.

“Don’t let’s rush him,” Oliver warned; although it was his calloused hands which finally freed the chick from the shell, and Donald quivered in the light, damp and ugly.

He peeped miserably at the three hungry children who could convert a fluffy pet into cutlets without turning a hair. A breeze moved a wisp of Julia’s bright hair and the little apple-seed eyes focussed on the movement.

“Peep!” said Donald.

“Awww!” the children breathed, and Margaret stroked the yellow fluff, now drying.

“We’ll have to keep him away from Dad,” she warned.

Alarmed, Julia picked the little creature up and hugged him to her chest and her eyes widened with horror.

“Don’t worry, Titch,” Oliver assured her, “I won’t let anyone get him.”

But it wasn’t as simple as that. With the imagined scent of roast duck in his nostrils,

Dad, pitiless, became a thing of iron resolution, like any overweight man deprived of extra rations.

He began eyeing Donald as if he could already taste him, roasted with potato and

gravy made from the meat juices, as Donald, unaware of impending doom, waddled

around the kitchen at Julia’s feet.

“We can’t afford to keep an animal that doesn’t pay it’s way,” Dad said, pompously,

and Oliver glared at the fat she-cat who perched on Dad’s shoulder.

Mum, knowing what was coming and unable to quarrel with the sense of it, snapped

at the children.

“Get that bird out of my kitchen!”

The children retreated to a quiet spot behind the currant bushes.

“He could fly away,” Julia suggested.

“He can’t fly,” Margaret said, coldly. “You carry him everywhere.”

“He could learn,” Oliver said, “He’s a duck after all.”

They climbed up onto the shed using the bough of the peach tree, and settled on the roof – Donald, Julia, and Oliver. Margaret stayed down below, to catch the duck if it fell.

“He won’t fall,” Oliver claimed, “Because he’s got wings – but just in case.”

He clutched Donald in front of him and the duck gaped happily into the breeze,

enjoying the view, and reassuringly close to his mother, Julia.

“One, two, three… now!” Oliver hurled the duck off the shed roof, and Donald fell trustingly down, quacking once but never opening his wings, to land safely in Margaret’s skirt.

Again and again they tried, but Donald had no idea that the air was his gateway to freedom. They knew he liked water – he spent most of his time in a bucket – so they took him to the pond and put him on the water. He paddled idly in the shallows, and eventually, tearfully, they thought it was time to leave. They hadn’t turned the corner before they heard a cheery honking from behind them, and there was Donald. Julia picked him up and carried him home.

But she couldn’t carry him all the time, and one day, the bells of doom tolled for Donald, while all the children were out at a church fete. A delicious smell met them on their return. It was meat, and the house was silent, without Donald’s quack.

Long faced, they sat around the table, and Dad carved the roasted duck, whistling. He lifted a slice of the dark meat onto his place, then Mum’s, then raised a slice above

Oliver’s plate. Oliver’s fair face suddenly turned very red.

“I’m not eating damned Donald!” he shouted, pushed his chair back, and stomped from the room into the garden.

The girls looked stricken. As one, they stood, not daring to raise their voices, but quietly leaving the room, and out into the garden. They couldn’t help listening – there was no sound of quarrelling, no demand for their return.

They gave it an hour, trying to stem their hunger by eating hard peaches from the tree, then tiptoed indoors again.

All was quiet and Mum was washing the dishes, while Dad was still at the table,

playing Patience. Neither parent spoke, to the children or to each other. Having tested the water, the children went outside to sit in the last of the evening sun, ignore their gurgling stomachs and mourn their duck, knowing they would be offered nothing but duck stew, duck rissoles and finally duck soup, for days, and would eventually cave in. There were no such things as picky eaters in that house.

By the back door, Margaret pointed. There was an old dish on the ground and by it, Dad’s cat was in ecstasy, her eyes glazed and her whiskers greasy as she dined heartily on Donald.

The next week, Dad brought them home a present – a sweet ball of yellow and black fluff, like a bumble bee, a duckling such as Donald had once been. They called her Daisy, and she slept in a box at the foot of the girl’s bed, and Mum never once complained about the mess she made on the floor-boards.

Dad assured them, he’d never eat duck again in his life – but this time, they made sure Daisy knew how to fly.

If you were to walk down a long, banked lane, under the twisted oak trees, past the fields where almost a thousand years ago the most famous battle in English history was fought, you’d find a camp-site edged by a stream which feeds a still, green pond.

Close by the stream is a blue tent, and in the tent, I’m writing this.

You’d need a torch – it’s nearly midnight. But you’d see the glow of my lamp, and this screen, and – if you were like me, and had an over-active imagination, and had been told about the Little Saxon Boy – you’d be glad to come in, and close the night outside.

I feel at home, here. Well, I am at home – the tent is my home – but what I mean is, I’m finally back in my own little piece of England.

I suppose I always knew I’d be back, but I never meant it to happen as it did.

It’s funny how you never know quite what’s around the corner, even if you think of yourself as a worrier, and believe you’ve made preparations. But the fact is, sometimes you can be living a life which you think is passable – ticking along – and suddenly you find that most of it is beyond your control. I made resolutions as the clock struck midnight and 2016 was born. And then it was spring-time, and I was hit by a perfect storm.

I probably used to be something like you. I had a house, which I rented. I’d been there three years, in a neat little village; I was not in rent arrears, was a quiet, respectable, middle-aged woman, private tutor to special-needs children, an author with novels in the county library, a small dog, a cat, books on shelves, pot-plants on window-sills. I had a newly-graduated daughter, a newly-wed daughter, a son working overseas, an elderly father, favourite walks, volunteer work at the weekends -all the usual stuff.

And then, over the course of a few weeks, normality splintered: my father died, I had another set-to with an old enemy, pneumonia, which meant I was unable to work for over a month, using up my small savings, and, a week following the UK referendum result, my land-lady served me notice of eviction.

I’d been warned – I supported Leave, and she didn’t. I put a red LEAVE poster in my window. I spoke at the village hall. I thought I lived in a democracy. I thought it was 2016, and I had rights.

In fact, I had no rights: at least, none which could withstand the spite of a rich woman who didn’t get her way at the ballot box.

Without the return of my deposit (she kept that, and disputing it costs as much as the deposit itself) as a self-employed single woman, without a reference from my landlady, and with pets, I was not head of any landlords’ wish-list. And into the bargain, with my home, went my job. I needed a fixed abode, to teach.

My children – one ‘friend hopping’, one in tiny accommodation for military only, one living overseas – couldn’t take me in. I thought there must be some help for those in trouble, but there was only ‘tailored advice’ from homeless charities who simply want to politicise the situation. The advice is always “can’t help”. The only remaining homeless shelter within 20 miles had been closed for lack of funding.

There was no help available from the local authority, either, who sent me a list of their criteria: I was not under sixteen, over sixty-six, pregnant, an ex-substance abuser, mentally ill, or an asylum-seeker. I was out on my ear, and into the bargain, the very fact that I had left on the date ordered, rather than waiting to be forcibly removed, was classified as “making myself homeless” which would have disqualified me even if I had been a perfect fit for help otherwise.

It seemed to happen very fast, but in fact, I believe now that everything had been gently spiralling down to this point for years, and at the last, I had to stop worrying and grieving, because there was no point: as I became a non-person, I was reduced, finally, to the me who was left when the trappings had gone, and I finally fell off the edge of the world.

I put my furniture, my piano, my photographs and books and pictures into storage, and bought a tent, a folding bed, a sleeping bag; I took my dog, Hemingway, my cat, Oscar Wilde, my lap-top, a bag of clothes, and went into shock, pitched on the top of a hill on a camp-site only half an hour’s walk from where I had once been a real person.

I am no longer real in so many ways. I have no vote, I can’t find proper employment, I can’t even claim benefits. An address is the key to the citadel.

I have spent 379 days moving from place to place, no more than three or four weeks in each, because if site-owners suspect a guest is homeless, the guest will be told to move along. The site licence depends on it.

And there’s no normal way out, because opportunities to earn money are so small, and site fees are so expensive, that I can’t save a penny. I repeat – I’ve fallen off the edge of the world.

Never think it can’t happen to you. It can. Like around 2/3 of the population, you are probably just one cancelled contract, one missed payment, one family argument or break-up or bereavement or spiteful landlord away from disaster. Nobody’s life is watertight.

With my old laptop I have always – just, by the skin of my teeth, with an occasional bail-out from a friend – been able to pay camp-site fees, so I have had water, a shower, electricity, although all these things, and especially food, have been a matter of emergency on many occasions. I’m one of the lucky ones, and I know how lucky I am because I’ve learned it is possible to lose what you think is everything, and still have a long way to fall.

I am not dead, found frozen in a public lavatory, nor have all my belongings been ploughed into the earth by laughing men with dogs and high-power torches and bulldozers at 3am, nor has my tent been confiscated by some pious council workers so that the problem of homelessness doesn’t remain hidden (apparently, a pop-up tent with a dry person inside it doesn’t touch the heart of passers-by as much as a poor creature curled up in the rain under a plastic bag.)

I’ve seen all these things.

I have survived 90 mph winds, and cold at minus 10 which has a dreamlike quality, the only aim to stay awake all night, so as not to go to sleep forever.

I’m still here, despite someone stabbing my tent repeatedly one night, at the place where my head would have been had I not sat up seconds earlier.

I’m still here, and into the bargain, I fell in love again. Not with a person, but with the countryside I’d left behind a long time before: with the coast of south-east England, East Sussex, which we call 1066 country.

As a London child, growing up in a place it was best not to hang around too long, I was taken here every weekend. My parents – younger then than my children are now – would pile all of us, plus friends and dog, into the back of an old Bedford van, and pitch a tent on top of a hill which overlooked one of those white-pebbled beaches pounded by a brisk sea. Behind us were the rolling green hills of the South Downs, trickling streams called “gills”, and the scars of centuries of invasion – from the Roman fortresses of the Saxon Shore, to the first Norman keeps, through the towers built to repel Napoleon, to the rusted ‘pill-box’ gun emplacements where the line was held against Hitler.

This place is front-line England.

It is also where I was always happy. I’d avoided it for years, because of the ghosts, not wanting to be disillusioned, with an idea that one day – when everything was OK and easy – I’d come back. But here I am, at the toughest time of my life so far, and it still heals, and I feel my roots go down into the earth.

If you were here, you’d understand.

This is my own green and pleasant land, and to defend it I would do more than risk being evicted by a spiteful landlady.

It’s an understated beauty, with mysteries accepted and lived with quietly, in a very English way. Nobody is making a huge noise about the fact that, under one of the longest beaches, a place of white dunes, is an entire medieval town, covered forever in a storm one night.

The bent oak where Edith Swan-neck mourned her husband Harold Godwinson, last elected king of England, slain by the Norman invaders, is still here – I could walk there in half an hour – but nobody makes up folk songs about it.

Secretive ancient woodland harbours glades of Bluebells with a perfume which would intoxicate anyone, and here are paths which have been walked since the first families crossed the land bridge before the great flood which made us an island.

And at the back of it is the sea, and brisk little towns of laconic people who don’t make a fuss, but have as many stories as the noisier Celtic Fringe.

I was scared to return, in case I went for a walk and met myself coming back, and had to account for who I’ve become. But now I’ve come home through necessity, and I think it was with a purpose, to write about these places, to set them in stone in some small way.

The homecoming wasn’t without pain.

The farm where we camped on the hill, where I would run loose as a child – first with my dog, then as a teen with my friends – where first illicit cigarettes were smoked at sunset, listening to ‘Sundown’ on a tinny transistor radio and watching the sea melt into twilight, where first love was found, and first kisses stolen as bats swooped around us, and lamb’s tails lay fallen on the hillside, where my parents will always be alive and young, and where everything is breathless, waiting to begin – was bought and built on, years ago.

And all these busy years I was thinking it was there waiting, tucked away up the long crooked lane with the ruts and puddles, past the cherry trees, at the top of the impossible hill where summers last longer, and the world is safer, and new.

It’s what I dreaded, and it would have broken my heart, a year ago, but I’m tougher, now.

And I can write it into existence again, frame it so that it lives and breathes.

And with that intent, a year I never thought I’d need to live, falls gently into place.

It’s amazing the purpose you can find, when you fall off the edge of the world.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=mandy+baldwin

Thought I’d ‘re-do’ book covers!

Quarter Past Summer, Going Down To Burgois, and The Seaweed Dragon use my own paintings as cover-art – my thanks to Cezanne for the new cover of A Festival Of Cherries.[image error][image error][image error][image error]

Suffer Little Children