Home / Other writings
This section will list writing other than novels by Jim Crace. It is not intended to be a comprehensive list but to give an overview of Crace’s career outside novel-writing. Where feasible I will reproduce the text of these pieces, or selections from them.
Material is grouped into the subsections listed below.
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‘Helter Skelter, Hang Sorrow, Care’ll Kill a Cat’, The New Review, 2:21 (December 1975), pp 45-49. Reprinted in Cosmopolitan and included in Introduction 6: stories by new writers (Faber, 1977). Click here to read this story of a husband’s revenge.
‘Cross-Country’, The New Review, 3:25 (April 1976), pp 47-52. This story appears, in somewhat revised form, in Crace’s first book Continent.
‘Refugees’, Socialist Challenge (December 1977). Click here to read this tale of
‘Seven Ages’, Quarto (June 1980), broadcast as “Middling” by BBC Radio 3 (date tbc). Click here to read the story that ‘marked the start of [Crace’s] migration from journalism to fiction’.
A Coat of Many Colours (working title: Salateen), tx 26 March
1979 (Saturday Night Theatre, Radio 4). Directed by Michael Rolfe for BBC
Birmingham. “In March, 1895, following almost thirteen years of imprisonment by
the Mahdist forces in the Sudan, Rudolph Slatin escaped and made his way to an
English garrison at Aswan. Slatin, an Austrian officer, and ex-Governor of
Have You Seen Our Chicken?, a parable of Christmas, pub. 23 December 2007 in the Independent on Sunday.
If it’s roughly 2pm on Christmas Day and the roast is almost ready to be served, then you can guarantee that yet again I will emerge none too briefly through the smog of sprout steam to stand at the kitchen door and bore my famished family with the parable of the disappearing chicken:
It was Christmas 1952. I was just a kid, overexcited by that
year’s present of a model, gold Coronation coach and a full Colour Party of
Coldstream Guards, only two inches tall but equipped with rifles, flags and
detachable plastic busbies. Throughout that morning, I had arranged them
marching across the lino of our flat on the Pilgrim estate in
Charley Crace, my admirably taciturn dad, had already made his escape, of course. He was socially ham-fisted, and so had done us all a favour by rushing off to his allotment to pick the sprouts and curly kale as soon as mum had got her lipstick out. Couldn’t I be taciturn, as well, and stay at home? But my mother, Jane, made it clear I had no choice. “Be neighbourly. Wipe your face,” she said, “while I check the chicken and put the potatoes round.” Ever the caterer; there was nothing she enjoyed more than feeding us. I could not imagine a Christmas roast prepared more lovingly than hers.
Except this year, I was dreading lunch. I knew that chicken
personally. It was Ferdinand, north
And so, although he’d been fattened originally for the 1951 Christmas table, it had been no surprise when Dad, armed with a length of twine, a hatchet, a knife and a shaking hand, chickened out as it were and granted Ferdinand a stay of execution until 1952. He told our neighbours that we’d reprieved Ferdie for the eggs. “And for the milk,” I used to add. So, for another year, our dinner pecked around our garden, living it up on mum’s best food. We’d bought him in the first place to save money. But Ferdinand – too plump to move far, too spoilt to make do with toast crusts and dried porridge – was costing us a fortune by now. I used to raid the fridge for him, behind mum’s back. This cockerel was very fond of corned beef, I discovered by experiment, and slices of tongue. He was not fond of tinned salmon or pickles.
Now twelve months on, as Ferdinand’s second Christmas approached, dad worked hard to feel ashamed of his previous soft-heartedness – this was only a table bird, after all – and finally plucked up courage. One late December morning when we were at school, he stepped into the cold frame with a sack and took Christmas dinner – protesting noisily for once – down to the shops where Ansell the Butcher was happy -for half a crown- to do what dad could not. By the time we got home Ferdinand was slaughtered, plucked, trussed and gibleted, and sitting cross-legged in the fridge.
The Bancrofts’ Christmas present for me that year was a white Dinky ambulance. I’d hoped for a police car or a fire engine or at least a khaki military ambulance with a red cross on its side. “It can go behind the Coronation coach,” I said, putting a brave face on my disappointment. “It can have the dead king inside.” My successful joke only partly lifted my mood. I’d been dragged from my toys and my chocolate, I’d been forced to wipe my face, I had been given the world’s worst Dinky – and Ferdinand, dear Ferdinand, was crisping up for lunch.
I cheered up though, when we got home. Again mum checked to see how dinner was getting on. I can remember it exactly: the Cannon cooker leaking smoke, my mother opening the mottled blue enamel door in her new oven gloves (my uninspired gift), her cry of baffled disbelief when she discovered that Ferdinand had disappeared – and that he’d taken all the spuds, the stuffing and the roasting tin along with him. My Dad was at the door by now, with his trug of winter greens. My parents knelt down on the kitchen floor and peered in at the oven flames. They even checked the oven with a torch, as if the half-cooked bird could have found a hiding place. But no -glad tidings of great joy- Ferdinand had definitely gone. We wouldn’t have to eat our pet. Hosanna in excelsior.
Now, losing Christmas dinner was no small matter, especially in a one-income working class family such as ours. A show of anger would not have been out of place, or a 999 call. Some tears, even. This was the meanest of crimes. But all my father did was laugh and wash the sprouts. And all my mother said was “Never mind.” She only wished that whoever it was that had walked in through our never-bolted door, whoever it was who had risked their finger tips to steal our Christmas dinner, and carry it piping hot away from the flats, really needed it: “I hope it’s gone to someone poor.”
An image almost out of Dickens came to me –still comes to me, whenever I remember Christmas 1952: it’s Ferdinand and our potatoes, lit by candle-light, surrounded by a throng of street urchins, about to have their first good meal. They’re holding wooden spoons. Their mouths are watering. Oh, how I loved my mum and dad right then. How proud I was of them for their calmness and their charity. How I love them now – though both are dead – when Christmas comes and I can tell my family, as we prepare to eat, about the darling cockerel and what he signifies.
What did we eat that day? I hardly want to tell you, because it weakens everything I’ve told you up to now, everything except the love I felt. “I’ve got a bit of cold tongue,” mum suggested finally. “That’ll have to do.” Sprouts, curly kale and tongue. She went to get it from our big gas fridge. And once again, I heard her cry of baffled disbelief. We thought the fridge had been burgled, too. Everything had gone. But, no, she’d discovered Ferdinand. “Be neighbourly,” she’d said, as we’d prepared to go into the Bancroft’s flat, an hour previously. “Wipe your face, while I check the chicken and put the potatoes round.” She’d checked the chicken, yes. She’d put in the spuds. But then – to borrow Gerard Hoffnung’s celebrated phrase – she “must have lost her presence of mind” and confused the oven with the fridge.
We all sat round our galvanised kitchen table, warmed by the open grate of the coal boiler, that Christmas Day, 1952, not quite sure if our enjoyment had been saved or squandered, whether we would feel mean or generous to tuck into our meal. We certainly were smiling, though. And then I can’t remember anything. Dad must have finally taken a knife to Ferdinand and filled our plates. My brother says he can’t “recall the eating.” Nor can I.
© Jim Crace 2007
Robinson Crusoe, a memory of a contented childhood, pub. 18 August 2007
in the Financial Times Weekend Magazine
‘Once Upon a Time’ column.
My father was a hesitant reader when I was a child. His own
schooling had been cut short by osteomyelitis when he was about ten, in the
early 1920s. So reading Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe aloud to me and my brother was a struggle for him – and a struggle
for us, too. He was attempting the unabridged version which, unlike later
robinsonnades such as Treasure Island
and The Swiss Family Robinson, was
not truly a novel intended for children, despite a subtitle which promised
“Strange Surprizing Adventures”. Its
religious overtones and Defoe’s ruminations on
Then – in a household of little other entertainment – I could amuse myself in front of the fire by mapping Crusoe’s island and putting all my salvage to good use. And on fine days I could construct a stockade in the green belt behind our flat and check the muddy lanes for Friday’s footprint. Never since have I been so thoroughly immersed in a book. It served and nurtured my innate and lifelong love of islands, the sea-shore, and especially flotsam. It also has become the enduring reminder of a contented childhood.
© Jim Crace 2007
I had been promised access – a warm welcome even – to the
home where I was brought up, in what was virtually the last building in north
It would be my first visit to the flat in 44 years and one which, given the recent death of my mother and the distant but still unabsorbed death of my father, promised to be both fulfilling and disturbing. One of its two current residents had said it would be “intriguing” to hear how much the place had changed since I was a child.
I looked forward to boring him about the rough domesticity of the post-War years and what a happy household it had always been for us. I did not expect to find anything I recognised. Our coke-fuelled boiler (that had taken four hours to heat the bath water) and the open fire, the deep Belfast sink with its wooden draining board, the galvanised Utility kitchen surfaces could not have survived the decades of Home Improvement and DIY. But the layout of the rooms would be the same. And there would be a torrent of welcome memories.
But at the last moment, I received a second, less encouraging call. I wasn’t welcome after all. The current resident had been forthcoming. Now he was icy. He had discussed my visit with his partner and what had been “intriguing” had become “inconvenient.” I was surprised –not to be refused entry. Why would this young couple want me poking round their home? - but to be so suddenly tearful. Those sixteen years in our street, Adelaide Close, had encompassed an immensely contented childhood. There were no ghosts or unhealed scars. I had imagined that when I saw the flat’s few rooms again all that happiness would be redelivered in some way. Now it was beyond reach. Its door had slammed on me.
Next morning, when the occupants were at work, I snooped around outside our flat. I had hoped to peer in through the netted windows. Perhaps I’d revive some image of my father, Charley, stern and indecipherable, engrossed in the News Chronicle; or my tirelessly hospitable mother, Jane, busy with her copper, mangle and steam iron. But in closes such as this, especially nowadays, casual visitors are scrutinised, mistrusted even. I was twice challenged with a “Can I help?” I settled for sitting in the car and staring across the same brick wall, the same wrought iron gate, and seemingly the same patch of lawn that we had had fifty years previously, towards a decoratively-bricked, arched entry that was once always open but was now locked and protected by security lights.
Very little had changed in Adelaide Close. The public pig bin where we used to dump our swill and the street gas lights had been removed years ago, of course. There were no horse-drawn traders or boys with buckets collecting the manure. And I could hear no chickens in the yards, being fattened up for Christmas. (Our own cockerel, Ferdinand, had been too lovable and then too tough to ever make it to the plate.) But on the green in the middle of the Close which delivery horses had cropped short and we had then scuffed bald with our football boots and skipping ropes, there was now good grass and some fine cherry and acacia trees. Take away the bumper-to-bumper parked cars and it could be 1952. This was still a very modest, unexciting and decent place to live. Though not with children, possibly. I saw only young couples and the elderly.
Later that afternoon, I managed to blag my way into an identical building to ours (loftily described by an estate agent as “a maisonette, with GCH and ORP”) by pretending that I was interested in renting it. “Perfect for a single gentleman,” the agent told me, not liking to inquire if she were dealing with a widower, a divorcee or a bachelor. Indeed, it was hard to imagine that these one-and-a-half bedroom flats, before the Revolution of Expectations had inflated our cravings for personal space and private possessions, ever housed families larger than two and a cat. How had we all fitted in – our family of four, with even larger families as neighbours - and still had room for that freezer-sized cabinet wireless with its huge glass valves and the great gas fridge?
I stood at the door of the smaller bedroom while the agent proposed “It’d make a nice study.” It certainly wouldn’t make much of a bedroom for two growing boys. I had shared such a room with my elder brother, Richard. It was not quite large enough to take two full-length single beds and still open the door. I had slept on a short divan, bought second-hand from a War-time amputee until, when I was about fourteen and my brother was seventeen, I’d outgrown it. Then we’d moved into the bigger room and my parents had slept on a Put-u-Up settee in the lounge. For £850 a month, I could sleep in such a room again, access to my childhood happiness almost available after all, if I would only sign along the dotted line, pay a fat deposit, and provide convincing references.
*
I drive along the back lanes of Forty Hill, and walk the
alleys at the side of
I can at least boast an aristocratic birth although my association
with Brocket Hall, the stately home in Hertfordshire – requisitioned as a
wartime maternity hospital - where I was born, only lasted ten days. This was a
house which had, and continues to have, unsavoury associations – Palmerston
dead under a maid on the billiard table, for example; Lady Caroline Lamb,
served naked in a soup tureen to the young George IV. My specific place of
birth was Joachim von Ribbentrop’s bedroom. The German ambassador and Nazi
foreign minister had been a regular house guest at Brocket Hall before he was
recalled to
After Monday 11th March 1946 when my uncle Harold drove me (painted gentian violet to treat the thrush I had contracted at birth) back to Adelaide Close in his spiv’s car, fuelled with black market petrol, my life turned as watery and white as the snow which my brother tells me, hampered our return. I was not ill again. I never saw my parents argue. I never heard them swear even. I was never hit, nor come to think of it, was I shouted at. Our Close was the perfect place for such an uneventful upbringing, safe, undistinguished, and anonymous. A cul-de-sac.
I learned to bulk things up to make my life, my family,
myself seem more substantial: the wounds in my father’s arm became the work of
German machine guns rather than osteomyelitis; my grandma was provided with a
gypsy background; my place of birth was evidence of my lost nobility; and the
clattering machine in Greenall the bookmaker’s house was not for ticker tape
but – I romantically approved of this - coded messages to Moscow. I would not
admit to strangers to being an
And maybe this does explain the novels, as Philip Tew has claimed: my safe and ordinary childhood, my upbringing at the hems of both town and field, my early propensity for lying might indeed explain the non-autobiographical, landscape-fixated, fabulist books that I have written almost intuitively as an adult.
*
My secondary school was the historic and snobbish Enfield Grammar, just behind the market square in Town. I showed up there, aged eleven, with the wrong class background (working), the wrong accent (Norf Lunnon) and, most problematically for a self-conscious boy, the wrong blazer - cheap wool from the Co-op warehouse in Leman Street rather than the glossy barathea with metal buttons sported by our better-off contemporaries.
Town has an eerie familiarity – it has hardly changed at
all, except of course that traffic is heavy, managed and one-way and parking is
hard to find unless you want to bump up on the pavement. (Enfield Council
netted a useful £1.5million in fines from just that habit in 2005). There are
no longer any pollution-friendly trolley buses, regrettably. The three
enticingly named cinemas – the
And the faces seem less exclusively white, (in the 2001 census more than 18% of Enfield’s 275,000 population, classed themselves as black or Asian) though compared to my chosen home, the Commonwealth city of Birmingham, my birth town, certainly the western side of it, seems hardly multicultural, despite an increase in British Cypriots and the recent influx of young Poles, serving in the plethora of new bistros and hotels. That makes all the unsolicited anti-immigrant comments offered to me by complete strangers, mistaking my white face for a badge of shared prejudice, all the more puzzling and depressing.
But there are enduring reminders of how it used to be: the local, workmanlike, slightly Australian accent which despite my four decades of separation I soon catch myself “norfing” into; the stalls and trestles (where there has been a weekly market since 1303), around the octagonal market house with its eight teak columns; the pubs, familiar, despite their insensitive renaming (The George, where I did my underage drinking, is inexplicably The Goose); the Victorian fountain on the traffic island where, as an obsessive teenage activist I stood in vigils against Imperialism, Armaments, Selective Education, and – on the morning of James Hanratty’s execution - capital punishment. And the boys from the Grammar School (now, thanks to my sole efforts of course, a Comprehensive, despite clinging pompously to its original name) look just like I did in the 1960s, still graded by their jackets, and their obligatory red-striped ties knotted contemptuously thick and short as a mark of their disdain for uniforms.
Here is a shopping street in a suburb which, though it seems
more informal than it used to and certainly more affluent, has less character
and very little identity beyond its own borders. It is another disappointment.
The centre of
It is both a shock, then, and a bitter relief to cross the
No longer. Jobs in manufacturing in
What was the Royal Ordnance factory at Enfield Lock on the
River Lea, famous for its small arms and motorcycles, is now
*
I take a look at Adelaide Close again. Apart from Mr
Greenall the turf accountant’s garden at the back, the Green Belt started where
our yard ended. Looking south from our front door, there were houses all the
way to
So now I do step north, just to discover what damage has
been done to the Green Belt. I have already driven along the
So my hopes for the Enfield Green Belt, already so oppressed elsewhere in the country, are not high. The village of Forty Hill itself, just at an angle to our flat, is not disquieting – though all the changes that there are speak volumes about how work, shopping and travel have altered since I was a boy. Mr Greenall’s lodge and gardens have been replaced by a roundabout and a retirement home, the unambivalently named Bridge House. (No need to wonder where that bridge leads.) The horse and cattle trough has survived, but there is no bus terminus. Where there were seven shops, there are two – a newsagents and the Village Wholefood Store.
But as soon as I leave the pavements for the paths of
Indeed, I am surprised to recognise so many individual trees
from my childhood, both in the Belt and out of it. The magnolia outside the
Conservative Association that we Young Guard socialists tried to poison with weed
killer just before the 1964 election is flourishing. The horse chestnut at the
back of our flat has reached a decent age. There are still a few of the
fashionable catalpas or Indian bean trees growing on the verges of the Pilgrim
Estate. The cherry at the back of the nearby house that my parents bought when
I was 16 is in its final years but still leafy. Even
I walk down unspoiled paths and over aged stiles for three
or four hours – Seven Arches, Tinky Tocks, Hilly Fields,
I end up, finally, below the three familiar sentinel
sequoias above the allotments where on a clear evening the lights on the radio
mast at
What I do see, though, is a pair of metal stakes at either side of the plot. I held those stakes steady fifty years ago while my father sank them into the ground with a lump hammer. He wanted them as supports for his raspberry canes. And I see that there are still raspberries flourishing exactly as they had. Now there are tears from me again. Here is the happiness that I had counted beyond reach, sentimental, English and suburban to the core. And here –two metal poles - is evidence that I have left my rusty mark.
© Jim Crace 2006
1979: Hearts of Oak,
in 21: Picador authors celebrate 21 years of international writing,
This ‘celebration’, published to coincide with Picador’s 21st
anniversary, included contributions from Oliver Sacks, Ian McEwan, Clive James
and others. Each author was invited to reflect on a single year out of the past
21. In 1979, Jim Crace was working as a freelance journalist when his father
was diagnosed with cancer. ‘Hearts of Oak’ is a moving recollection of Charley
Crace’s last year. And yet there is very little in the way of direct
description of the man, who was obviously a powerful and loving influence on
Crace. We are given to understand that deeds, not words, were what mattered to
him. The continuity between nature and man, exemplified in the figure of
Crace’s father ‘oaking the public land’, planting thousands of trees ‘without
any introspection’, is quietly offered as an alternative anchor to
sentimentality, religious or otherwise.
From the point of view of literary biography, ‘Hearts of Oak’ may be
interesting for the suggestion it contains of a link between Crace’s father’s
death and his definitive move from journalism to fiction.
I seemed to spend the whole year in the air. I had been complaining to the
commissioning editors of the Sunday Telegraph Magazine – with whom I had
a freelance ‘retainer’ – that I was tired of home-based journalism. I wanted
up; I wanted out; I wanted foreign travel. The pestering paid off. I flew to
Montserrat in the Leewards to interview George Martin at his new recording
studios, to New York to meet – or fail to meet, as it turned out – the singer
Debbie Harry of Blondie, to California to drive Pacific Highway One for a
travel piece, to the metal fortresses of Piper and Forties to report on
disaster control in the North Sea oilfields. I found myself – on the magazine’s
behalf – ‘rescued from drowning’ off the Lizard in
But most of the spring of 1979 - that spring which closed so cheerlessly on
May 3rd with Thatcher, newly elected on the steps of Number Ten,
predicting ‘harmony and hope’ – was taken up by two long-winded journalistic
tasks. One was a report on
It was not a time that I was glad to be so close to surgeons. Charley Crace,
my dad, had learned that the relentless ulcer which had plagued him for a year
was liver cancer. We walked one afternoon in early March to his allotment
overlooking the grounds of Forty Hall in north
We hardly mentioned illness. We looked for birds – and saw a pair of
woodcock – and talked about the news that day that the
In the following days, not depressed at all, I flew from
Airlines opened and closed by the day. Air
At Whitsun we were camping in
On Sunday June 3rd he seemed to rally. We carried him as best we could into the garden so that he could feel the sun, but this resurrection was short-lived. He soon was unconscious, only waking for the pain. On the Tuesday he went into a local hospital and there, in the small hours of the Wednesday morning, he died, alone. He did not want a funeral service. He didn’t care for priests or prayers or hymns. No flowers. No grief. Immediate family only. He did not want his ashes scattered anywhere. We let the crematorium dispose of him, and spent his wake disposing of his papers and his clothes. His allotment trousers were too old for Oxfam. I put them in the bin, but searched the pockets first. I found his wooden-handled pruning knife (which I still have and use) and half a dozen acorns. One day I’d find the proper place to heel them in. Instead of tears I shed my first piece of fiction for many years: a monologue by a woman whose father is dying called ‘Seven Ages’. It was published by Craig Raine in Quarto and then broadcast on Radio 3, and marked the start of my migration from journalism to fiction. The last lines were: ‘If Father goes, then what? Who is there left? Who is next in line? A foolish idea comes into my mind as I sit at the end of his bed: to turn my head and have him scrape the wax from my ear. More and more I am victim to such unexpected sentiments. Of course, I keep them to myself. This is no time for self-pity – though, sometimes, I wonder what has become of my good fortune.’ That was the year we swapped Thatcher for my Dad.
In late December I was in the air again. I flew up to Skye from
I took the flight back south. ‘We’ve made rather a speciality of taking writers back home,’ the pilot said, once he’d learned my occupation. ‘We run a Coffin Charter. We take the writers home to be buried. We took Compton MacKenzie back to Barra. And we also took Eric Linklater back to Orkney.’ It was a fearful journey with 35-knot headwinds labouring against the plane, its wings hardly able to locate soft passage in the dusk. I am more introspective – and more theatrical – than Dad ever was. I dropped his acorns somewhere over Argyll, but the wind might have scattered them in Orkney and beyond. We made the slowest progress one can make by air and, robbed of acorns, bereft of my good fortune, I feared that I would never reach the ground. Physically I did, an hour overdue. But otherwise, I never touched the ground again, not solidly, not after 1979. Since then I seem to spend the whole time in the air, gliding in the gusty thermals of my father’s death. There is no gravestone, no ashy earth, to take a bearing from. But there are oaks.
(c) Jim Crace 1993
Click here to read ‘Seven Ages’, the story mentioned above that ‘marked the start of [Crace’s] migration from journalism to fiction’.
1. Chernobyl comes to Paradise, a report on the impact of
radioactive fallout from
2. The knotweed menace, a survey of the damage wrought on
3. Tide and
prejudice, a
personal account of the land and seascapes that have meant most to Jim Crace
4. Waiting
for a Miracle, a report from
1.
Sunday Times Magazine, March 15, 1987
On 26 April 1986, the worst nuclear power accident in history occurred at
‘This was my last piece of journalism,’ Jim Crace recalls, ‘written
between the hardback and paperback publication of Continent and showing
a favourite theme of my novels: landscape, and a community under pressure.’ The
original article was accompanied by evocative black-and-white photographs by
Peter Marlow.
Somebody – not a local Welshman – has scratched the word PARADISE on a
car-park slate by the Celyn reservoir, in the
‘When I was at school in the valley there were 65 pupils, and the chapel was
full every Sunday night,’ says 73-year-old Robyn Jones who, together with his
son, Elfin, farms 428 acres on the Ty-nant stream above the lake. ‘Though we
took our water from the stream in a kettle, we could make the best cup of tea
you ever drank, that’s for sure.’ He points to the scattered outcrops of brick,
the makeshift sheepfolds, which punctuate the hillsides. Each was once a family
home. ‘But now, it’s all gone or it’s under water,’ he says. ‘They flooded the
valley and its 18 farms in 1963 to provide free water to
Robyn Jones looks heavenwards with transparent dismay. Behind him, in a
stone outhouse, officials from the Welsh office are running a hand-held
scintillation meter – which measures radioactivity – over the rumps of Ty-nant
lambs. All 54 are judged to be ‘clean’. A certificate is issued and the lambs
can now go to Ruthin market for slaughter. ‘Not before time,’ says Elfin Jones.
It is seven months to the day since
***
It was on Friday May 2 that the cloudborne remnants from the explosion of
reactor number 4 in the
The weathermen were wrong. The winds changed. And seven days after
The locals thought little of it, particularly when the Secretary of State for the Environment, Kenneth Baker, told the House of Commons on the following Tuesday that radioactivity was ‘nowhere near the levels at which there is any hazard to health’. The rains of early May were forgotten and the business of lambing got underway.
And then, on June 20, came the news that has disrupted and dismayed the
farming community of
The half-life of caesium 137, the predominant isotope found in the samples,
was known to be approximately 30 years. But the assumption was that caesium 137
in a living body would be naturally excreted. Ninety days was the more
conservative estimate. However, the farmers of
***
The year 1986 had not been a good one for Welsh hill farmers. The droughts of the previous summer and an unusually severe winter had delayed the spring growth of both lambs and grazing. Despite a system of ‘hill compensatory allowances’ and price guarantees, many of the smaller holders described themselves as ‘under pressure’.
‘We’re in the survival business,’ says Bernard Malethan who, with the help
of his wife Glenys, ‘Wyn the YTS’, and a shed of ageing machinery, breeds from
500 hardy pure-bred Welsh mountain ewes on poor-quality land to the south of
Colwyn Bay. ‘The squeeze is on. The banks are getting jittery. Land prices are
tumbling. There is no wealth in these farms. We’re not complaining. Our
community is close-knit, slightly isolated, yet going well. But life is not
easy for us as it might be for some farmers in the Home Counties.’ For him and
his colleagues the working vehicle is more likely to be a
‘You can’t eat scenery and you can’t bank fresh air,’ say the farmers; yet the benefits of landscape and culture are clearly powerful inducements to remain in the hills. It is a land of stone walls, wind and (most of all) a rain which echoes the curiously watery cadences of the Welsh tongue. Here are found the only two constituencies with Plaid Cymru MPs. Even though it is generally English voices that are heard behind the counters of shops and hotels or living off such ‘fireside talents’ as pottery and candlestick making, the children of these newcomers are ‘Welsh within a year’. They attend local schools where everything from physics to French is taught in ‘the language of heaven’.
‘I’m embarrassed by city friends who say, "My God, you’ve got a hard
life!"’ says John Hooson, who farms at Pentrefoelas. ‘Compared to what?
Compared to people in
It is true that life is not often leisurely. There is the routine of husbandry, the cycle of seasonal appointments, lambing, ditching, hedging, shearing, cutting silage, working dogs, maintaining ancient stone walls against the pressure of wind, ramblers and (not infrequently in North Wales) the occasional earth tremor. But farmers talk of being ‘woven into the landscape’, of having ‘soil in their blood’. ‘I would not claim to be downtrodden,’ says John Hooson. ‘Our life is tough. We grapple with the elements, single handed. But we have chosen to stay. We are volunteers.’
***
John and Nesta Hooson were in
‘By mid-July we had begun to get nervous,’ says Hooson, who farms in the
traditional hafod and hendre (upland and lowland) style, with 500
acres of the poorest, grade five, land around his 12th-century
farmhouse, Plas Iolyn. ‘Still, compare to the
He presents a picture of husbandry during a normal year with spring lambs progressing from birth to marketplace on a carefully modulated ‘conveyor belt’. The farmer is constantly ‘removing mouths’. The lambs that are mature in June are sold, and grazing is freed for the smaller lambs to reach maturity in July. ‘Now we couldn’t move sheep off our land,’ says Hooson. What happens in these circumstances? ‘The mature lamb is competing with its siblings for food. It loses bloom. It deteriorates like an overripe fruit and its value in the marketplace drops. Your land is grazed into the ground and that includes land that was earmarked as hay and silage for the winter. You’ve got rogue tups on your hands. They’re randy and running free, working the fat off their backs, causing a nuisance. You’ve had to spend extra money on dipping and dosing for fluke and worm. You’ve told your bank manager that the overdraft is soon to come down. Now, suddenly, you can’t sell lambs. You have no cash flow. And there’s nothing you can do about it.’ Except protest.
***
On Wednesday, September 3, the small and normally quiescent town of
Inevitably the blues, which struck an odd, punkish note as they were driven to the auction pens, commanded a poor price, sometimes as low as £1 a head. The lowland farmers who bought them were taking a gamble. If controls were lifted quickly they could make a huge profit. If restrictions persisted, the maintenance of their blues throughout the winter might damage their farms and bank balances irrevocably. For the restricted farmers there was compensation. But any such schemes which resulted from what the Secretary of State for Wales, Nicholas Edwards, describes as these ‘unprecedented problems’, would ‘inevitably…involve a measure of rough justice’.
By early September, despite the minister’s evident pragmatism, there was widespread dissatisfaction. The farmers wanted the ‘averaging’ method of calculating market losses changed – it enriched farmers selling unfinished lambs at the expense of those whose early lambs had become overfat following slaughter restrictions. They also wanted compensation not only on the low prices that their lambs and breeding ewes were fetching in the market, but also on the ‘consequential losses’, the costs of holding unfinished lambs on the farm.
‘The farmers might have been chatting like nuclear scientists about becquerels and half-lives,’ says John Hooson. ‘They might have cheered to the rafters any farmer who made an emotional speech about the dangers of radiation for our children’s children. But it was fear of going bust, of losing out on compensation, and not caesium 137 that kept our passions flaming.’
And so it was that, on the evening of September 3, 300 or so irate farmers gathered outside the Eagles Hotel at Llanwrst to ‘welcome’ Martin Bevan, an assistant secretary in the Welsh office. John Hooson, who was among the official delegates inside the hotel, told Martin Bevan, ‘This is a moderate meeting. If things don’t improve in the next few days, it will not be so moderate. Feelings are running very high.’ Outside, moderation was giving way to exasperation.
‘If our problems had occurred for wealthy Englishmen in
The farmers stormed into the hotel ballroom where the meeting was being held. Chairs were banged on tables. Coins were thrown. Welsh oaths were aired. And Martin Bevan, legs ‘visibly quivering at the knees’, was ‘escorted’ to the telephone to cries of, ‘We want the organ grinder, not the bloody monkey.’ ‘Mr Bevan handled himself perfectly,’ says Bernard Malethan, ‘but he could see we wouldn’t let our hostage go until he had extracted a promise from Nicholas Edwards to meet the farmers.’
Already the mythology of the Welsh hills is that the rapid introduction of
new schemes for market losses and ‘direct additional expenses’ was directly due
to ‘the mob at Llanwrst’. ‘We’re more politically alive than the hill farmers
in
***
The ‘organ grinder’, as minister Nicholas Edwards had been called, was
sympathetic to the ‘noises’ coming out of Snowdonia. He himself lives in a
valley in Pembrokeshire with Welsh hill farmers as neighbours. But the events
of
‘When the restrictions were first imposed, I thought it would be the finish
of the sheep industry in
***
Seven May lambs managed to escape the flock – and the foxes – on Trebor Roberts’s hill, the Aran Fawddwi, which rises just short of 3000ft to the west of Dolgellau. It was not until late November that he finally brought them down to the pasture land which surrounds Esgair Gawr, the farmhouse in which his wife, Annwen, was born and which Trebor had tenanted and then owned for over 20 years. On December 5, sporting the last of the government’s blue paint on their foreheads, they were put to auction at the livestock market in Dolgellau.
In a normal year – and with lambs of this quality and weight – he would have expected to have made, say, £26 for each animal. In the end, despite the auctioneer’s exhortations (’You’ve got a bonus here – a dab of blue paint’), the seven sheep are knocked down to £14 a head. ‘Not bad, considering,’ says Trebor Roberts as he passes 50p ‘luck money’ to the buyer, Wellan Beamond from Newtown in mid-Wales. The coin adds a sentimental touch to the transaction – but Trebor Roberts is a sentimental man when it comes to sheep. He presents them as wise, prescient and home-loving. ‘That’s something to spit on,’ he comments, though Mr Beamond has hopes for a greater profit than 50p. It’s a gamble – but he already has 300 blues. In April they could make him £30 a head.
For Trebor Roberts the departure of his last seven lambs marks the end of his most worrying year: his land ‘contaminated’, his sheep ‘dirty’, their lambs ‘blighted’.
‘We live poor and we die rich in hill farming,’ he says. ‘All my spare cash
is tied up in stock and land. But I’m not only worried about money and sheep.
I’m worried about the people of
Three of four times a week a goods train crosses the farm at Teilau Bach near Blaenau. The farmer and his mother, Heddwyn and Olwyn Hughes, remember ‘happier, safer days’ when GWR steam locomotives carried holiday-makers to Bala. Then there was a halt on their land where locals could board the train for shopping expeditions or trips to school. Now the only traffic comes from the nuclear power station. The cargo of drums and 50-ton flasks contains industrial trash and spent fuel contaminated with radioactivity.
For Heddwyn Hughes the railway is ‘a death line’, threatening his health,
his income, his peace of mind. Every train has come to represent a cocktail of
worries and pressures. Not only
Heddwyn Hughes is not alone. Throughout the valleys and hill farms of Snowdonia there is an emotive chorus of cynicism and mistrust about the local nuclear power station. Farmers and their wives point towards the square and functional building at Trawsfynydd, at the grey steam which rises from it, at the humming pylons. Apart from the slate quarries at Llechwedd, it is the ugliest site in Snowdonia.
‘Most of the farmers would like Trawsfynydd to close right now,’ says
Myfanwy Evans. She and her husband, John, farm 700 acres up-valley from Trebor
Roberts. Her sister dies in 1964 from leukaemia and she wonders whether their
land was ‘contaminated long before
There are wild rumours of dangerously irradiated sulphur emissions from the
station’s smoke stack, of a corridor of unexplained cancers along the railway,
of a major leak into
Yet research from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food showed
abnormal levels of caesium in Trawsfynydd waters (which are used to cool the
reactors) before
‘I have never hesitated to eat trout from the lake,’ counters Mike Williams,
the station health physicist. ‘In order to get any radiation effect from the
power station you’d have to stand still in one spot, eating fish, for a year.
But nobody does that, and nobody consumes mud. So the effects are
infinitesimally small.’ So certain is he of the comparatively low levels of
contamination that he ate more Welsh lamb after
One thing is certain, the
He lists the employment record of Trawsfynydd – 600 jobs in an area where 19
per cent of the population are out of work, the railway line kept open by the
power station, the local roads built at CEGB expense. ‘The Welshman complains
that his sons and daughters leave the valleys. We offer jobs and we keep their
children here. They should look on us not with fear but with fondness.’ His
tone of voice suggests it is a cruel and undeserved irony that an environment
and a lifestyle so disrupted by events at a nuclear power station 1400 miles
away should have, on its doorstep, a nuclear plant of its own, an easy
scapegoat for all the woes and resentments of the farmer. ‘I’ve even been
blamed for the failings of the lamb compensation schemes,’ he says. ‘That’s the
confusion that
***
And when will it end? At the end of January this year 100,000 sheep in 315 holdings in upland Gwynedd were still under ‘farm arrest’ (compared with the original 2 million sheep and 5100 holdings). Apricot paint had replaced swimming pool blue for those sheep which had failed a live monitoring test. The government’s ‘Cherno-bill’ for losses under the various compensation schemes had exceeded £2.1 million.
The hauliers, the slaughtermen, the livestock auctioneers, the farmers who
had slipped through the net of schemes were counting the cost of an expensive
and depressing year. ‘It has been a disaster,’ says Richard Jones, the
auctioneer whose company lost in excess of £3000 in three months because of low
commission on
The Welsh hill farmers are now preparing for this year’s lambs with a sense
of foreboding. ‘The idea that the caesium would simply pass through the sheep
and just get washed away has proved not to be correct,’ says Professor John
Owen, of
‘Only a fool would be blasé about what might happen in the next few months,’
he says. ‘There is likely to be some recontamination of sheep on the mountain
and, possibly, a reimposition of restrictions during the summer.’ And then what
colour will we paint our sheep? Ask our farmers. Red for danger. Black for
death. The more imaginative among them – fuelled by press pictures of
genetically deformed post-Chernobyl rabbits in
‘Lambing can be cold and hard work,’ says Myfanwy Evans, ‘but it can be a pleasure, too, when everything is going well. We call it the local Spring Handicap Chase. You just gallop along, 24 hours a day, and get the lambs born. But I certainly don’t want to be there alone at two or three in the morning and pulling out a deformed lamb.’
‘There is no safe level of increase in radiation,’ warns Professor Owen.
‘All the evidence suggests that genetic damage from radiation increases
linearly and does not rely on passing a certain arbitrary threshold such as
1000bqs/kg. Any increase will cause extra deaths or genetic defects.’ Experts
have calculated that ‘some tens’ of people in
With sheep he is less circumspect. ‘You would be looking for malformation in
lambs,’ he says. ‘Aborted lambs. An increase in the abnormalities that occur
already – headless lambs, legless lambs, various deformations of the jaw.
Embryos might simply fail to develop. Or there might be a slight mutation which
does not show up until the second or third generation. It is possible that it
might be several years before the worst effects of
***
Trebor Roberts still walks his hill and inspects his livestock with the calm
and contentment of a man at peace with the landscape. His son, Emlyn, who is at
agricultural college in Aberystwyth, will inherit the farm and, no doubt, his
father’s ornate ramhorn and hazel crook. ‘Personally I feel that my task is to
leave theland in a better state than I found it,’ he says. ‘Can I claim to have
done that, after
© Jim Crace 1987
In this article, Crace, in correspondent mode for a local magazine,
documents another aspect of the changing landscape. Japanese knotweed, ruefully
referred to by many gardeners as ‘the plant that ate the west’, continues its
depredations to the present day. The article was signed ‘J.C.’.
Moseley residents are fortunate in having a wide choice and variety of park and riverside walks within easy reach. None of them, though, is exempt from the invasive damage of non-native plants and trees.
Rangers at Cannon Hill have recently completed the felling of the huge - and
non-native - sycamores in the Seven Springs woodland (behind
The Himalayan balsam has already shouldered out much of its bankside
competition on the River rea from the
Not so the Japanese knotweed, which is threatening to penetrate and damage many of the open spaces around Moseley. Imagine a plant with the tenacity of ground elder, the virility of bindweed, the cussedness of couch grass and the physical height and stamina of bamboo and you have some idea of Japanese knotweed and the threat it poses.
The plant was introduced in the last century by estate gardeners as an exotic polygonum suitable for shaded or infertile patches. The purple-to-red stems are attractive in spring and autumn, and there are loops of creamy flowers from July to October. Attractive, but profligate too, with foliage which excludes all undergrowth and deep roots which choke almost everything but large trees. The Japanese knotweed can not only reproduce from seed but also from root growth. It can even regenerate from a scrap of stem or foliage, and with such proficiency that half an inch trapped in the tread of a walking shoe and shed elsewhere can establish itself as a nine-foot-high shrub within a year.
The knotweed – or Japanese bamboo, as it is also known – is already
flourishing throughout the formal gardens of Cannon Hill. The largest patch
exists in what was varied undergrowth between the windmill and the Rea. This
area was cleared by strimmer in July but each decapitated plant had reappeared
within the month. It virtually controls the island in the middle of the
wildfowl breeding pond. And there are well-established patches at the back of
MAC, in the daffodil glade beyond the poppy meadow, at the edges of allotments
on the
Even
It is easy to remove surface plants by snapping off the stems or by using strong foliage killers such as Tumbleweed. But it is not possible to dig out the roots. They are too deep and too determined. No-one has yet devised a method of controlling the Japanese knotweed. In the meantime – and too late for Moseley – it has been declared a banned species, illegal to plant, sell or propagate.
© Jim Crace 1992
Condé Nast Traveller (1999)
This engaging article, written to coincide with the publication of Being
Dead, combines reminiscences of the desert with some superb evocations of
coastal landscapes. Useful background for those interested in Crace’s life.
A favorite family photograph: it is June 1988 at the Balsall Heath Carnival
in landlocked
The grandest and most thrilling cities – Rio,
There was a time when such a deprivation would not have mattered to me much.
My love – and need – of coasts has come with middle age. When I was younger and
more adventurous I did not find myself fidgeting like some brine junkie if two
months passed without the tranquillising fix of spray and shore. Indeed, for
more than two years in the 1960s, when I was a volunteer in the
But even in the Kalahari I could not entirely escape the softer, bookish romance of the coast. Some witless academic examiner in Britain, either not caring or not knowing that Botswana was a nation with hardly any standing water or rainfall, 600 miles from the coast, had chosen The Pearl by John Steinbeck as a GCE set text. My pupils, none of whom had ever seen the sea and for whom the ocean was as relevant and reachable as outer space, had to grapple with the oyster and the shark, the reef, the snorkel and the surf, and listen to me rhapsodising all the wonders of the shore. I’ll not forget their disbelieving, shaking heads when I described a giant clam, or their attempts at drawing octopuses.
An equally witless academic had been at work when I was living in the
Each weekend I used to take off on my 98cc Yamaha or in a borrowed Mini Moke
(both surprisingly mobile in deep sand) and drive into the
One day, carelessly turning pieces of stone below the truncated pyramids at
It was not until almost 30 years later, when I was exploring Judea, that I
could finally admit that my youthful love affair with deserts – and, indeed,
with what had become my second passion, the high landscapes of
Izzat abu Rabia, my Bedouin guide, and I had been walking in the pie-crust
hills behind Qumran when he received an urgent summons to
I went down to the Tayelet Promenade and walked a little grumpily along the
manicured and unremitting sand of the
But nothing can repress or silence a sea entirely, even one as docile as the
Med, and nothing can reduce the shimmer and the splendour of a sky and ocean
as, far out on the horizon, they attempt to reconcile their battling greens and
blues. High in the desert hills of
New-Age beach-huggers of my acquaintance regard a love of coastlines as instinctive and primordial. One can’t evade the bio-sentimental links, they say, between the music of a lapping shore and, first, the rhythmic pulsing of your mother's womb and, then, the ancient echoes of our primeval selves dragging our damp, evolving bodies from the ocean to the land. But no; sitting on the beach that afternoon in Tel Aviv with nothing to achieve except to see the sun go down, I recognised that for me the pleasures of the shore were less nebulous. I simply liked the wildly ruminative and mantric entertainment of the waves.
That morning, when I’d been sitting on the odourless ridges of Judea, overlooking the blue peaks of Moab, it had seemed that nothing, other than the weather and the light, could change, would change, as long as I stayed put, even for a century; the continuity was its appeal. But on the beach at Tel Aviv, and especially on oceanic coasts where the tides are deep and restless, an hour is enough for everything to change. The waters dance before your eyes, retreating and advancing to directions from the weather and the moon. What once was shallow water is now sand. What once was deep unbroken sea has sunk a foot or two to bare its rocks and weed. The tide has flooded in where there were pools and picnic spots. And then the waves retreat again to lace the beach with stranded lines of kelp, concealing stones or shells or crabs. The coast is always on the move. Impermanence is its appeal.
Nowadays, I am obsessed with being on the coast. Not out at sea; I have no
appetite for boats, nor for the grandeurs or dramas of the stormy world
offshore. What I like best are deeply tidal coasts in places where the light is
thin and sharp, and where there is always the danger of a chilling wind and
slate-grey seas. The tropics will not do, though I have spent exciting times in
But the single seascape that has become my second home (and would become my
first if my liking for
So there is hope for
© Jim Crace 1999
Sunday Times Magazine, 22 Jan 2006
This report from
The volunteer farmers who bare their skin throughout the
night and offer their blood to the mosquitoes of Pailin are taking grave risks
for a good reason. Armed with a flashlight, some cotton wool and a test tube
each and with their trouser legs rolled up, it is their low-tech duty to wait
until an insect, attracted mostly by the carbon dioxide in perspiration or
breath, alights on their skin to feed, and then to capture it for the
laboratories of Phnom Penh where its disease-bearing parasite levels can be
assessed. In this remotest district of
Cambodia, tight up against the Thai border on the northern slopes of the
Cardamom mountains where the Khmer Rouge fought their final battles and where
some of their cadres are now senior figures in the administration, the tropical
mosquitoes are amongst the world’s most deadly. A single unlucky bite and any
one of these eight human baits, working in four-hour shifts, could be infected
with Japanese encephalitis of which [in September 2005] there is currently an
epidemic. In the past six months almost a thousand south-east Asians have died
from it and many thousands more are facing paralysis or brain damage. Or these
volunteers could become the bone-aching, haemorrhaging victims of dengue which
is at its most virulent during this season of monsoons and which, though not
normally lethal except for children and the very old, is incurable. According
to Richard Veerman, my Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) host and its Head of
Mission in
But it is neither dengue nor encephalitis that should worry me most, when I sit down on the boggy ground with my back against the hemp hedge in the tiny, rain-soaked village of Pang Rolim to join the volunteers and bare my own leg to the mosquitoes. Nor is it the deadly Russell’s vipers or the cobras that are common in the soy-bean fields just yards behind us. Nor is it even the undetected and undetonated landmines which, according to a recent UNICEF report, make these farmlands “one of the most dangerous places in the world.” What should have kept our legs covered is the knowledge that the anopheles mosquitoes of Pailin or, more specifically, the single cell plasmodium falciparum malaria parasites which live in them and us, were the first in the world to develop (through over-prescribing and incomplete dosing) a resistance to chloroquine. This is the drug which for decades has been humankind’s main defence against malaria. I have suffered from malaria before, in The Sudan, and I survived with little more than a debilitating fever, but that was the less deadly p.vivax strain which has yet to develop resistance to drugs.
Yet my fellow volunteers and I are not being foolhardy. We can be relatively confident that whatever the parasite-load of the vectors filling their abdomens with our blood, we are unlikely to contribute to the worldwide toll of 2.7 million malaria deaths each year (out of the at least 350 million -almost exclusively poor- people who, according to a UN report of May 2005, sicken with the disease.) In this fortunate village at least, there is a new and readily available treatment for p.falciparum, a cocktail based on artemisinin, an extract from sweet wormwood. But it has to be administered swiftly. All the locals understand from the too recent and bitter experience of neighbours that to contract this strain of malaria in Pailin and leave it to its own devices, is to invite a rapid and painful death. After a week or more of gestation, we could expect fever, muscle pains, and headaches, explains Bart Janssens, MSF’s medical co-ordinator. For any victims beyond the reach of artemisinin, however, diarrhoea, nausea, anaemia might develop. And then, finally, in a third to a half of all cases, there would be “severe complications”, including brain damage, multiple organ failure and coma. “You could be dead in ten days,” he warns. “It happens. And it is a horrible way to die.”
Our job that night, under the cheerful scrutiny of entomologist, Dr.Tho Sochantha, from the Centre for Malariology, is to help verify what the rapidly falling p.falciparum prevalence and death toll has been suggesting, that MSF’s volunteer-based, rapid treatment programme for malaria in these forest-edge villages, where heavy shade and high humidity offer the perfect conditions for breeding mosquitoes, is “breaking the pathways of transmission” between female insects, parasites and humans.
My own contribution to the insect survey is only modest. I
seem at first to be more attractive to ants than mosquitoes. But finally, in
the pitch darkness and to the
*
Over the next few days, in the pretty, straw-roofed, stilt
villages of Treng Leu and Phnom Reang (or Tree Mountain), accessible to only
the toughest off-road vehicles with the most reckless of drivers, the MSF
mobile malaria team and its dignified and gentle Thai co-ordinator, Raden
Srihawong, meet up with some of their 40 trained community volunteers to “mass
screen” every available inhabitant for malaria. Their simple purpose is “to
reduce malaria morbidity by finding more patients.” The villagers, in their
mixture of traditional blouses and fake Nike or Puma t-shirts and an eclectic
array of hats, are queuing in the mud at the temporary canvas and bamboo tents
that MSF has erected for its medical inspection. They are the strongest-looking
buildings in the village. There is a lot of barking from the distinctively
curly-tailed dogs and some crying from the children. Both seem alarmed by the
presence of so many strangers and so much activity. But all the adults are
delighted -and a little amazed- to have so much medical attention offered for
free and on their home patch. These are some of the poorest communities in