Category: Testimonials

Charlotte Margarette Elisabeth Louise Aitken Née Petri: Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Imagine the scene.  It’s 1930.  The German port of Stettin on the Baltic. The docks once heaving with international trade and traffic have an air of desolation.

You can see the idle grain silos, the cranes waiting in vain like herons for their next catch from the sea, a few tankers float un-easily on the water’s surface next to a dozing war frigate left over from 1918. Breath deeply and you can smell the rancid houses lining the dark damp TB infested streets.

A young German woman, Charlotte, is hurrying down the street, voluminous bag in hand, ill-fitting hat on head.  She has a determined look in her eyes.  She bangs fiercely on a few doors. There’s no answer.  She shouts up at the windows.  She demands someone answer her.

A few children look out from the house windows, a few slither out into the street, followed by a man – their father she presumes – who rushes out, shouting a few words in half Polish, half platt Deutsch at the errant children.

She pleads him but he ignores her, cuffs the children around the head and tries herding them back in doors.  She puts her foot in the door and  doesn’t allow him to shut her out or them back inside. She half hears a woman lustily  singing contralto from the top of the house the Martin Luther hymn, Ein Feste Burg:

A mighty Fortress is our God,
A trusty Shield and Weapon,
He helps us free from every need,
That hath us now o’ertaken.

A neighbour tries to advise her to leave well alone but she ignores him and offers a few choice caustic comments of her own to the neighbour who, distressed at her wilfulness makes his way back up the street, shaking his head. She continues to hammer at the shut door in front of her. Eventually the door opens and 15 children spill out into the street, clambering all over the young woman, looking eagerly up into her  eyes, searching her bag for signs of food, play and  inspiration, pulling her this way and that.

The bag is torn from her grasp and out spills jars of jam, jelly, salad cream and loaves of unappetising bread.  Brown paper bags  of carrots, leeks and lettuces are strewn across the road and trampled by the ravenous young children into the mud.  The children are still not satisfied and hunt deeper into the bag. They remove books, games, hand puppets,  candles, lebkuchen and a toy piano and wave them gleefully above their heads until the young woman loudly reprimands them. They meekly stuff everything back into her battered old bag as she chastises them for being so greedy.

She leads the straggly crowd of children down the street away from the docks to a room at the top of another Baltic hanseatic  house where they meet 50 other children who are packed like eels into a fish crate.

The only difference being these eels are alive and kicking and hungry. Hungry for food, education, god, a kitchen, a church and a family.

And that’s what Charlotte gave them, and that’s what she gave all of us, her family who have gathered here today to give thanks for a life which was marked by devotion,  sacrifice and sheer bloody mindedness.

A few years after this scene in the back streets of Stettin, Charlotte meets  a young gallivanting English architect, Francis Keith Aitken. No-one has recorded the first comment she made when she met him but the chances are it wasn’t too coherent.   She’d hated English at school and had been the worse pupil in the class.

Nevertheless, there’s more to language than just words.  Within two years the couple are married and her street kids give her and Keith a roaring send off at their wedding in Stettin.  They subsequently move to Crieigiau near Cardiff in Wales.

A few miles down the road in Swansea and four years younger than Charlotte Margarette a young Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas,  was growing up with his own brand of energy and indignation.  A good few years later he was to write:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

One thing you could say about Charlotte Margarette  was that she never went gently into anything: and her last few years bore witness to her energy and spirit which would kick and fight anybody that she felt was getting in her way.

We might have said to her,  you didn’t have to kick so hard.

But she never gets to swap notes with Dylan Thomas  before she and Keith move to London and the  South East where she gives birth to three children,  Veronica Mary in 1936, John Mark in 1938 and William Martin in 1947.

Living in England as a German woman at a time when this nation had declared war on your brothers, sisters and kith and kin could not have been an easy situation to tolerate.  That period of 1939 – 1945 has left its own scars across the continent and no doubt it left them on Charlotte Margarette Elizabeth  as well.  But if they did, they’re not immediately visible.

Her children’s memories are of her singing Schubert’s cradle songs when they wouldn’t go to sleep, walking in the woods in Petts Wood and going to the swings in the local parks: activities she would repeat with her own grandchildren 40 years later.

But she’d given up singing when we wouldn’t go to sleep; she’d be more inclined to stomp upstairs and fiercely instruct us to be quiet – and our walks with her in the fields around Heronsgate were accompanied with Chess the dog, Mickey the dog, Bonzo the dog and any unnamed number of others she’d collect on the way:  much like the Heinz 57 variety mongrel street kids of Stettin, rough and ready to snap at your heels if you got too close.

But back in the 1940s although there is a war going on there is also home-made Blackberry jelly, lettuce, carrots, salad cream, playing in the sandpit with all the children of the cul-de-sac and  Children’s Hour on the wireless. This is  a safe, secure childhood, which despite the war – or is it because of it? – is neither frightening nor threatening.

Ah, the wireless.  That old Bush contraption could only ever half heartedly receive the Home Service and the Light Programme.  A generation later would see it still broadcasting interminable episodes of The Archers at the prompt 1 o’clock lunchtime.  After that we would be ordered upstairs to take our afternoon rest so that she and Keith could retire to their bedroom: to listen to the Archers in peace and quiet, we presumed.

In 1956 Charlotte Margarette Elisabeth Louise  and the family move to Lindens in Heronsgate.  Over the years her mother, brothers and sisters and their families all  visit. August, Eva,  Erika, Thomas, Nick, Friedrich Wilhelm, Monika, Patricia, Petra, Carlos, Peter Macher, Roseann, Tante Heidi,  school friends and far-flung cousins fly into Heronsgate trailing their glamorous clothes, strong perfumes, exotic triangular bars of chocolate for the children and arrive confident, continental and not at all English.

Shining through these visits was her pride for her homeland and conviction that her brothers and sisters were the best in the world and that she could never match up to them, that she was at the bottom of  the list when it came to looks and intelligence.

But for us you were never at the bottom of any list although you might not have believed us had we told you.

Charlotte Margarette Elisabeth Louise’s devotion to home, children and church meant that growing up in Lindens provided many of our formative memories and moments.

But whilst her religion was about love, forgiveness and resurrection you wondered whether there was a sterner old testament prophet who’d be whispering in her ear, telling her not to be so soft and that the one God was a fearsome God indeed who would not flinch from punishing any transgression, real or imagined.  If she wanted to die and God would not let her, then he would punish her with ear ache to stop behaving against the word of the Lord.  Her faith was naive maybe: but none the worst for that.

But in 1993 the Lord summons her Keith for the last time.  She is so distressed she ends up in hospital, kicking and fussing like only she can do, getting out of bed, setting off the fire alarms, phoning the police or wandering half-dressed outside the hospital grounds.

These were sad days. She’d lost her one true partner in life and suddenly  she lost all her bearings.  It was like her past had come full circle and was now suddenly confronting her in the here and now, rather than the there and then.

She’d lost the one voice who could help her negotiate the world rather than barnstorm her way through it and she was never quite the same again.

Charlotte Margarette Elisabeth Louise Aitken. You had a good marriage which lasted a good 60 years and brings us all here today.

The last five years saw you travel to Brazil, sell up Lindens and settle down in Dapplemere Nursing Home where on the 22 January  you finally gave up kicking and blew out like one of your Christmas tree candles.

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You were born in Reichenbach in Pomerania in 1910, daughter of August Petri and Auguste Horn.  You grew up in Belgard with your five brothers and sisters – Friedrich Wilhelm, Erika, Lisi, August  and Albrecht.

You married Keith, bore 3 children and 7 grandchildren and at present 7 great-grandchildren, scattered across the globe in  America, Brazil, Wales and England, all in all not a bad haul for a young nurse who went fishing in the back streets of the Port of Stettin.

So perhaps in a world where we’re increasingly advised to stop kicking and to accept our lot,  your persistent energy of resistance is something we might rekindle, celebrate and aspire to when times get tough. As Dylan Thomas might have said…

And you, my Omi, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Testimonial for Charlotte Margarette Elisabeth Louise Aitken Née Petri, February 2000.

The film above is a homage to the staff and residents of Dapplemere Nursing Home in Chorleywood, where Charlotte Margarette Elisabeth Louise Aitken Née Petri spent her last few years.

Richard York Owen: Deal or No Deal?

The last time I saw you was at the retirement home in Stafford. We had gone up stairs to your room to prepare to go out for what you used to call ‘a swift pint’ – although the concepts of ‘swift’ and ‘pint’ were often awkward companions in your sentences and never sat happily together.dad - 18

You had the TV on and we sat and watched “Deal or No Deal” for a bit, the programme in which a hapless contestant is plucked out of obscurity from a group of hopeful contestants and is given 1 of 22 red boxes in which a sum of money is hidden.

He tries to guess what might be in his own box by opening the other contestants boxes, one by one, revealing the money they contain. By a process of elimination he starts to figure out what prize might be left in his box. As the game continues however, he is subjected to the temptations of an off screen ‘banker’ who offers him various ‘deals’ which may be less of more than his potential prize. The contestant’s dilemma is whether to cut his potential losses, accept the deal or reject it with a polite ‘thank you, Mr. Banker, but no deal…’ – and continue his progress in the game, with the hope that he is going to land a bigger prize and beat the banker into the bargain.

You and I sat and watched this for a few minutes and chuckled over the hapless contestant. He’d look at some-one else’s box and then look at his own and we could see him thinking…. Does he have some thing better in his box than I have in mine….? Is the grass greener over there or here in front of me….? On this occasion, he plumps for someone’s else box – and has his hopes dashed when the other player reveals the biggest treasure, a whopping £250,000. This steady drip drip drip of continual disappointment continues through the game until the potentially glorious destiny the contestant was confident about early on in the game is dashed into a thousand pieces. The only box left in the end is his own, complete with an apologetic 10p prize. The other contestants swarm around our 10p victor, all commiserating in what might have been.

What might have been is an epithet for many of this games contestants: what might have been, had this not happened, had that not happened… If only…. If only not…. hindsight, as the contestants on this show will readily tell you, is the ultimate prize in the game of Deal or No Deal.

The prize of hindsight lets us revisit the past and put all the wrongs right and the rights even better. The losses turn into gains and the gains metamorphose into triumphs. Hindsight gifts us 2020 vision, complete knowledge of the state of the turf, the weight of the jockeys and the mood of the horses. Hindsight instils in us the wisdom of knowing where the finishing line is and how far it is from the starting line: hindsight give us magical predictive powers to guarantee the name, colours and pedigree of the 3.45 at Aintree on a wet Saturday April afternoon.

Which is what we set out to do a few years ago at the Grand National, perhaps the time when I saw you at your happiest. Out in the Tattersall Stands, stamping in unison on the wooden floors with the massed ranks of the Irish, French and Scouse bookies who had met up for their annual pilgrimage. Your winnings of perhaps £100 for the day were spent by 10 that evening on Guinness and Chinese takeaways which replenished the predictive powers of your stock of hindsight and which led to the identification of some more dead certs for the following week out on the race courses across the country.

Watching your travels as we grew up meant that places like Aintree, Chepstow, New Market, Haydock and Uttoxeter became mysterious, hallowed lands – part of a cultural landscape through which money seemed to flow freely – albeit too frequently in the wrong direction. Elvis Presley was making a name for himself in that far off country and the land there offered you escape, freedom and the opportunities to open innumerable boxes, all of which were marked with the really big prizes, all of which were too alluring for you to turn down.

Your journeys through that landscape provided us with some puzzling and yet delightful memories: the trips to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – 15 times; skating around Brighton ice rink in circles for whole weekends at a stretch: your work as a chef in a Jersey hotel kitchen whilst fending off the mysterious interest in you by Frankie Howard. Treasure hunts on holiday in which prizes of multicolour biros, cross word puzzle books, wind up dogs and Barbie dolls delighted everyone. Your easy, generous desire to entertain all of us led you to organise shows and pantos for many people of all sizes, shapes and ages; your charm and tolerance of others helped bring the best out of them; and your willingness to assist in developing other people’s potential sometimes perhaps dampened your need to fulfil your own.

In recent years the cultural landscape you visited took more diverse and startling turns. Watching your journeys from Stafford to Redditch, Usk, Cheltenham, Bristol, Bath, Sutton Coldfield and Leeds forced us all to look at the places we thought we were familiar with, in new, harsh, uncomfortable lights. Your return to Stafford earlier this year however provided all of us with a sense of relief that you were coming close to something you would call home. We know these were not easy times for you too: but know too that your positive and optimistic outlook carried you through.

In the end, your optimism happily outshone your hindsight: and that was a deal worth winning. In your game of Deal or No Deal, you beat the banker with the best deal of the lot.

Testimonial for Richard York Owen, 30 July 2007

 

How do social networks deal with the death of their users?

It’s weird when you hear out of the blue about friends who have recently died but whose profiles are still on Facebook. Not quite believing your ears, you check out their latest postings and on their timeline they look as lively and as connected and engaged as the last time you saw them. But now their profile looks like a tombstone, albeit surrounded by adverts exhorting our deceased friend to buy a hair transplant.

For all their vitality and here-and-now-ness, Facebook and Twitter and their online cousins don’t deal with the reality of existence fully at all. You exist in the sense that you have a presence but once you exist, there is no undo button which allows you not to exist.

Of course, expecting any social network to step up to the existential plate of what it’s all about Alfie is unfair on the Zuckerberg enthusiasts who have transformed how we interact with friends, enemies and colleagues on line and in real time. The Big Z would be the first to throw his hands up to protest that the purpose of Facebook is nothing to do with questions of what it is to be alive and everything to do with answers of how we fill our time whilst waiting for the delete button to be pressed on our real time profile.

But one of the internal contradictions in Facebook is that the Big Z and his enthusiasts cannot delete you as the only person who can delete you is you – and if you’re not there, then clearly you can’t delete yourself. of course, if you indulge in some real time trolling they can cut you out of their biosphere at the flick of a wrist, but if you continue to live your life in an innocuous and uncontroversial manner, and then are unlucky enough to keel over in the middle of your Chinese takeaway, you end up, as far as Facebook is concerned, in a permanent state of living and not living: also known as purgatory.

Twitter offers even more extreme existential opportunities. You don’t even have to exist at all to have an account on Twitter: you can generate an identity just by following a few commonly available algorithms on applications such as Weavrs.com. And you can end that identity, just as easily, or let it survive ad nauseum, independent of any human agency. Twitter, in that sense, allows for immortality of things independent of you. A bit like God, I guess.

There should probably be a Facebook graveyard where profiles are ceremoniously laid to rest although how they were deal with different faith’s approaches to the funeral arrangements beggars the imagination. One thing we can be certain of is that even in life or death, Facebook will continue to ply us with adverts which try to sell us hair transplants, life insurance or holidays in the Cotswolds. The optimism of the sales force at Facebook never ceases to amaze.

Farewell then, the Mathew Street Festival: you will not be missed it seems…

So, Liverpool’s MSF has finally been axed in a torrent of righteous civic reasoning: its cost, its burden on the rate payer, the fact that it didn’t give Liverpool good marketing head, the dire quality of its lookalikee, soundalottee-like-the Beatles bands and the staple rhetorical ingredient that has everyone nodding vigorously: the plethora of out of control drunken youth and elders who should know better who spitted and slavered and vomited their way through days of debauchery, inchoate vileness and early morning urban horror when you forgot where you parked your car and which hedge you left that stash of Special Brew under. Oh sorry, where they forgot to park their car and forgot the hedge that they left that stash of Special Brew under.

The inability to find anyone who will speak up for the MSF is curious. Is there no-one out there who admits to having affectionate memories of its tawdriness? I for one will remember it fondly; the afternoons of hanging out with the squash team and assorted wives, girl friends and partners, strolling through the deserted commercial district, bereft of business purpose for a few short hours, as we guzzled down can upon can, stuffed kebabs into our faces and generally appreciated the diabolical renderings of songs we knew, loved and now felt sorry for as they were being mutilated by bands of cough cough aged hairy blokes thrashing at their guitars in misguided attempts to recreate Woodstock in the back alleys off Duke Street.

For all the mess and spit and spew, many of us did have some good times during those August afternoons and whilst the booking of the RLPO in Sefton Park might be useful in civilising us all a tad more, and those family friendly days will bring out the tots with their previously scared mums and dads, nothing will quite beat the experience of listening, astonished, to those assorted ‘tribute’ bands with hackneyed names and shocking hair styles.

No doubt within a couple of years, though, the call will go out for a city centre music festival that can capture the mess, sound and incoherent fury that all good rock and pop encapsulates. Until then, we’ll sit around Sefton Park lake like the good modern citizens we are, and applaud the endeavours of our city fathers in helping make the city a reasonable, polite place to live in.

Paddy Masefield: still sending out shock waves and unsettling foundations

It’s been a hectic few months what with Treasured at the Cathedral, the Serbian and Macedonian visit, the business start up work at Liverpool Vision and the myriad of other activities we are musing about, thinking of and trying to lay the foundations for. Paddy’s commemoration means that I can get away for a few days and think about all that fragmentation and stresses and strains in an environment which is a little quieter and offers the opportunity to reassess exactly what it is we want from the world ahead.

This was Paddy’s legacy for me. Working with him both at LIPA and within Aspire during times of organisational growth and stress and challenge meant that you had to step back from the common place, the usual, the humdrum, and completely reassess what we were doing, how we were doing it, and why we doing it at all.

His work with us at LIPA on establishing Solid Foundations sent powerful shock waves through the organisation, challenging established ways of thinking about disability, ability, arts training, arts development and who had a right in the first place to stand on stage and command attention.

His work meant we had to rethink everything about the student experience; how they got into HE, what he meant by accredited prior learning, the integrated curriculum and student progression. This of course had a direct impact on the students who joined solid foundations – but it’s impact and his influence were more wide ranging.

It meant that students on the so called mainstream programmes had to address their own concepts of identity, of ability and what was being asked of them when it came to not only developing and devising new work, but what it meant to rethink traditional ways of acting, of music making, and of dance for example. It meant that staff had to rethink how impairment might inform the student assessment process for example and whether there were other insights that disabled staff could bring to the process that couldn’t be accessed by their nondisabled counterparts. Far from providing solid foundations, Paddy was instrumental in rocking the very foundations which we thought held up conservatoire arts training in the UK.

Paddy’s influence was felt by many students and staff, although many may not have met him in their times at LIPA. Many of them are still working and have gone onto great things, Mark Rowlands, Mandy Redvers Rowe and Jaye Wilson Bowe to name just a few. I’d like to thank you Paddy for giving me that space to rethink, to replay and regalvanise. Your shock waves are still rocking our foundations to this day.

Testimonial for Paddy Masefield, 20 October 2012
Battersea Arts Centre, London

RIP Lanternhouse, Cumbria. Lest we forget.

Like a cantakerous old Uncle, I’ll remember Lanternhouse in Cumbria as a somewhat distant relative – but whose influence over my professional growing up was always keenly felt: hovering over my shoulder, whispering exhortations, yelling out criticisms and the ocassionally deranged epiphet which caused the rest of us in the extended community arts family to look at each other in that modern, knowing way. Uncle John was clearly not on form we might mutter; he’s seen better days someone else would offer.

What we shouldn’t forget that without Uncle John, we would not be stood where we are now. Sometimes the shoulders of the giants we stand on start to tremble– and its at that point we’re obliged to stand up straight and take the load off them rather than castigate them for not being who they have been, and for what they’re not doing any longer.

Farewell Lanternhouse and everyone who was fortunate to benefit from your lights. They’ll continue to shine into the darkness of this recession long after the politicians who put you there have faded into miserable obscurity.

If you have a memory of Lanternhouse – or indeed any of the arts companies that are now fading away in the cultural freeze of this recession, please feel free to send them in and we’ll post them up here.

From Paul Kleiman:

Lanternhouse magical moment: a beautiful midsummer’s evening concert, with the band starting in the streets of the town, a tower of instruments and bells, and at the climax, a hot-air balloon flying right over the top of the tower. (the balloon was pure coincidence!!)

For an ongoing list of companies MIA click here.

Lest we forget: dear departed arts and culture organisations who won’t be remembered in despatches (unless we remind people)

As the recession continues its grip on arts companies, small businesses and sole traders up and down the country, its noticeable that many of them are slowly disappearing without a murmur. We don’t think that’s a fitting way to say farewell to those many organisations who have contributed to our national cultural health – whether they’ve been around for 1, 10 or 50 years.

If you’d like to commemorate any arts organisation’s demise, please let us know here and we’ll compile a list of unfortunate souls who didn’t make out of the credit crunch, recession or economic downturn or whatever it’s called today. We’ll make a list which we’ll send onto the relevant organisations (local authorities, arts funders, charities and so on) to put them in the picture of who we’ve lost. If you can add details of a website, numbers of jobs lost, matched funding opportunities missed – and other useful, public quantitative data – that would be great too.

In memoriam:

A-Foundation, Liverpool

Activ8 Success, Birkenhead

Aspire Trust and Aspire Creative Enterprises

Audiences Central

Brewery Theatre, Taunton.

Contemporary Urban Centre (CUC), Liverpool

Durham City Art

The Cholmondeleys and the Featherstonehaughs

Flambard Press

Foursight Theatre Company

Jazz Action

Lanternhouse, Cumbria

Matthew Street Festival *gone but not forgotten, even though some of us would love to forget it and all it stood for”

Pacific Road Arts Centre, Birkenhead

Pele Productions

Quicksilver Theatre, London. Lost the funding after 34 successful years.

7 Sefton Libraries

Theatre Writing Partnership

Urban Strawberry Lunch

Wolstenholme Creative Space

Whilst other organisations are not yet extinct, the combination of funding cuts at national and local levels is putting them under immense strain. Many organisations have seen massive staff cut backs or remaining staff giving their time for free in order to save the long term health of the company. Their efforts should not go un-noticed.

More at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17536195

The Tuesday Rant: how the arts sector is being shafted by parts of the public sector who should know better.

Dear local authority,

It has come to our attention that you are increasingly awarding tenders for arts projects to universities whose turnover is a zillion times higher than the value of that tender.

Do you not realise that you are undermining the sector you claim to represent?

Dear university, why do you insist on putting students on public projects which effectively takes the bread out of local artists mouths? Do you not realise you are shooting the local arts economy in the head every time you place an unqualified graduate into an arts project?  Would you accept student doctors diagnosing your children’s health if they’d done just one year in medical school?

Dear local authority, why are you complicit with this act under the guise of getting ‘value of for money?’ Old mill owners got value for money by exploiting their workers to within an inch of their lives.  Why are you contributing to this outdated industrial practice? And more importantly, why are you allowed to keep getting away with it?

Maybe you’ll appreciate our case once all your arts workers have lost their jobs because of your funding cuts and come back to the sector to look for work… Only to find there is a skeleton of a sector left because it’s been shafted by universities who place unqualified students on projects which should be run by qualified local professionals. And offer access to their so called ‘premium spaces’ in order to claw back some of the massive capital deficit they’ve built up in ‘investing’ in the local economy. 

Dear local authority, dear university, please don’t coming looking to the sector to dig you out of a cultural desert in a few years time. The responsibility for that emptiness will be yours and the students who have long flown the city.

Flow: prayer for a provisional ending

As life begins
The circle of evolution continues
Life flows through my body
like the wind blows through nature.

Flowing beside the city
Beside the river
Down by the docks
Along the far side of the port,

My words and stories evolve into thoughts and memories
and through these
my world becomes a performance.

A place where the boats fill up
The seagulls fly straight
And the passengers look out
To a place and time

Where my imagination flows
My humanity becomes a performance
Where possibilities begin
And end and begin again.

The tide surges
It falls back
The salmon are left on the shoreline
Waiting for the signals

To call them back
To the ocean
And back to the stream
They left in their youth.

But will the flow ever end?

Composed with Emily Frodsham on the morning of the death of Steve Jobs, as part of the final performance of the Flow Community Arts Autumn School, Sigdal, Norway.

Geoff Pennycook, in memoriam.