Jackdaws

I am reading a short story by William Trevor called "Traditions"; in it he describes how a group of schoolboys have been keeping jackdaws but somone has killed them all. It called to mind a farmer who lived a mile or so from us when I was a child who had a pet jackdaw.
In the story by Trevor the boys had tried to make the birds talk; so, according to his son, did the farmer. I'm not sure if he was successful because you always took everything his son said with a pinch of salt: the jackdaw was real alright, but whether it could talk no one knew - it never talked to other people perhaps, only to "close family", so to speak!
Dickens creates a wonderful bird, not a jackdaw but a close relative of his, a raven in his novel "Barnaby Rudge".

"Look at him!" said Varden, divided between admiration of the bird and a kind of fear of him. "Was there ever such a knowing imp as that! O he's a dreadful fellow."
The raven with his head very much on one side and his bright eye shining like a diamond, preserved a thoughtful silence for a while....
"Halloa, halloa, halloa!" the bird said. "What's the matter here? Keep up your spirits. Never say die. Bow, wow, wow. I'm a devil, I'm a devil, I'm a devil. Hurrah" - and then, as if exulting in his infernal character, he began to whistle.
"I more than half believe he speaks the truth. Upon my word I do," said Varden.

One day someone asked about the farmer's jackdaw - he hadn't been seen for some time.
"He died," the farmer's son told us boys sadly. "We'd clipped his wings to stop him flying away but he fell in a barrel of water, couldn't fly out and drowned."
We all looked sad.
"Dad's very upset," he added. "Drowning his sorrows."
I'll bet he was. He had a good excuse for once!

Gwyn Jones

The name Gwyn Jones came up today when having a coffee with a friend who had recently been present at the dedication of a plaque at Aberystwyth University to the man who was a professor there.
Gwyn Jones came from my home town of Blackwood; he was near contemporary of my father and they knew each other. Occasionally they would meet in the main street in Blackwood and chat - they were acquaintances rather than friends.
Their lives had followed different paths though they began similarly.
Gwyn Jones had gone to secondary school followed by university followed by a teaching post, followed by a professorship at Aberystwyth. He wrote novels and short stories though he is best known for his translation of the Mabinogion and his writings on Icelandic sagas. He was born in 1907.
My father was born in 1895, went to primary school but did not attend secondary school because his father had died suddenly and so he had to become the bread winner. He was working in the coal mine from about twelve onwards, rose to an office job on the surface, from there to a Labour Exchange and from there to work in the Coal Board where he eventually succeeded to a post as Labour Relations Officer in Cardiff.
He too wrote novels none of which were published; he wrote short stories too as did Gwyn Jones and some of them were published and broadcast.
Gwyn Jones wrote in a beautiful style which, I always felt, had a trace of the academic about it. My father wrote in a more flamboyant style which had nothing of academia about it at all.
I wonder what would have happened if my father had gone into Secondary education instead of working down the mine; he should have and could have if his mother had taken up an offer from an uncle of his to pay the fees necessary for such an education. But how could she? There was little if any provision then for widows with children as far as I know. So down the pit he went. And here I am. It wouldn't be me writing this if he had gone the other way.
"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both....." (Frost)

10 Best Films

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker has given a list of what he thinks are the best 10 films of 2008. I wish I had seen some of them; most are foreign films and they are not distributed except to art houses (like Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff). Only three on his list were American: "The Quantum of Solace" which most reviewers treated with scant regard as to its quality, "Iron Man" which again did not receive very favourable reviews, and "Changeling", the only one on his list that I have seen, directed by Clint Eastwood and which has been favourably reviewed by practically every newspapers' critics. "Wall E" I know nothing about.
My favourite film of the year was "Gone, Baby, Gone" which I think has one of the finest ends ever (almost vying with Chaplin's "City Lights" for an intensity of sentiment and irony) and contains one of the best performances I've seen for years: the mother of the missing child. For that she should get a supporting actress Oscar.
Anthony Lane's book "Nobody's Perfect" (the last comment in "Some Like it Hot") is a wonderful collection of his reviews and essays. One remark has stuck in my head, one he made about Rees Witherspoon: "she's the girl next door who can't wait to get out of town".

Moaning Minnies

I once tried to collaborate with a woman in the writing of a play; she had been a quite well known actress and had, with her more famous husband, written plays which had been performed. The idea was that I would write a scene and then she would read it, comment on it and perhaps, do some re-writing.
It didn't work. I wrote the first scene and when she read it she said: "I like the idea and I like the male characters, especially the parliamentarian's agent, but I do not like the wife of the MP. She is a real misery."
"But she is supposed to be," I said. "She's miserable because he's such a bastard."
"You won't get an actress to play her."
"Why not?"
"Because she's a misery, a moaner, a pain in the neck."
I tried re-writing to make her a different sort of woman but couldn't get her right, so the collaboration didn't work and we gave up trying.
Then this morning my wife was listening to The Archers and I could hear from the other room one of those women in the programme moaning and grissling and making such a caterwauling noise that I had to go elsewhere. I thought: "They get away with it in The Archers, why couldn't I have got away with it in my play?"
And if by chance I turn on East Enders every woman on that soap is a Moaning Minnie. (And most of the blokes too!). And what about some of Shakespeare's tragic females: Lady Macbeth for example - that's all she dies is complain and criticise and moan. And what about Hedda Gabler?
Maybe I'll dig that play out again and, instead of trying to make the wife more pleasing, leave her as she was..... You never know, it may just work.

Shock Treatment

In the new Clint Eastwood film, "Changeling", there is a scene of real horror when a friend of the main character, played by Angelina Jolie, is forced to undergo electric shock treatment in an asylum in twenties America. Clint, of course, knows how to raise the temperature when directing violent sequences (I find it hard to watch some of his late westerns) and succeeds here in making you feel almost that you are experiencing it yourself.
I once wrote a letter to The Guardian expressing my horror at something the paper had reported: the enforced electric shock treatment given to a Catholic priest. The letter was published and elicited a series of letters to me: most thought that I myself must have suffered the same thing - not so; or that a member of my family had suffered thus - not so; or that I or a close relation had suffered or was suffering mental probelms and that we feared such treatment may be practiced on us - not so. One person thought I must be a Catholic and that my sympathy for the priest was a consequence of my own belief. I'm not a Catholic so not so.
Thank Heavens such barbaric treatment for mental illness is no longer used.
I once knew someone who had received such treatment when he had had a breakdown; he never talked about it ( a friend of his told me). Later when he got back to normal, so to speak, he became a successful writer of detective stories with about 50 novels published.
You must not draw any conclusions from those two happenings: that the second was due to the first.
Again, not so.

Jazz

Alan Ross in his book "The Rest is Noise" writes about black composers in the USA in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Some were well taught and trained and became wonderful players of various intruments, but they never could get recognition and often, like Will Marion Cook (whom Dvorak thought would become a great composer), never made the grade in classical music and resorted to forming bands.
Cook formed a band called The New York Syncopated Orchestra and asked Sydney Bechet to join it - which he did.
I may have come close to Sydney Bechet a long time ago. On a holiday in Paris some time back we, three students, joined a club called The St Germain de Pres night club. We spent a lot of money there and heard a lot of good jazz and saw some rather risque shows....
Anyway, a few weeks after coming home I went to a barber's shop in Cardiff and the usual bloke cutting my hair asked me if I'd been anywhere nice on holiday. I told him I'd been to Paris and while there had joined the St Germain club.
He stopped cutting hair; he came round to look at me.
"Sydney Bechet plays there," he said.
"Really?"
He continued cutting my hair but I could see he was moved or impressed or envious.
I knew (I had seen him a few times) that in his spare time he played in a local swing and jazz band that performed at various dance halls in the city.
Like Bechet he played the clarinet.

Singing and Whistling

Jimmy Durante liked to "start the day with a song". The trouble is that if I do (in my head rather than vocally, under the shower) it stays with me for the rest of the day.
I remember going to a symphony concert in Cardiff when I was a student and hearing Sibelius's 2nd Symphony; the next day I heard various versions of the famous tune of the last movement in the corridors of the college: those who attended the same concert were heard to be either humming or whistling it pretty well all day.
Once that tune gets into my head it stays there for hours if not a day if not days.
Again, the final movement of Sibelius's 5th Symphony - though it's difficult to hum, sing or whistle the final bashing notes; all you can do is think them.
Thinking tunes is an odd practice though it must have been what Beethoven did when he went deaf. At the first performance of his 9th. Symphony, which he conducted when he was completely deaf, he could not hear the applause at the end and a member of the orchestra turned him about to face the audience. He could "hear" his own music but he couldn't hear the applause.
I tend to whistle rather than sing chiefly, I suppose, because I feel that my singing would be too unpleasant to others.
Georg Bernard Shaw did not sing in the morning (to my knowledge) but it is a recorded fact that before he retired for the night he sang long and loud, not just one song that had stuck in his mind but heaps of them: arias from Mozart particularly. I wonder if his wife welcomed it or put in her ear plugs.
If his singing compared with his acting abilities it wasn't up to much. Sybil Thorndike used to tell of Shaw's occasional visits to rehearsals of his plays and how he used to show them how it should be done - "he was hopeless" she maintaned.
What I've got in my head at the moment is "Many a teardrop will fall/ But it's all/ In the game...." (Nat King Cole is singing it).