Hats

Red hat, blue hat, green hat. Felt hats, fur hats, wedding hats. Mad hatter hats – that’s actually a place called that near where I used to stay. No Red Queen, but down a leafy lane and, yes, you could probably see a March hare there if you were paying attention.

I never used to like hats. Why? Because when I was young I was made to wear one to church every Sunday. Those days of white gloves. Trouble was they always fell off my head – was it the shape? of the hat? and /or of my head? I reckon it was because my hair was so fine and everything slid off it – bows, ribbons, hair clips. Result, my mum fixed elastic to the hat to try and keep it on and I hated that elastic. It cut into my throat from ear to ear. As soon as I could I always took the hat off.

It wasn’t until I was on a winter’s holiday in a very frozen Hamburg that I bought another hat, sometime in my thirties. One third of your heat is lost through your head. Lately its been more of a case of keeping the heat off my head. But I still prefer to ‘let the wind blow back my hair’. My love hate relationship with hats.

Braving the new world

Isn’t it nice when things start to fall into place like when you are first getting to know new people?

Moving to a new town means braving the world. One of my strategies for this is to join a book group. As I read a lot anyway it seems an obvious thing to do but also it tends to attract interesting people. It has proved a useful way to open doors in the past. So of course I did that here. I have so far been to just one meeting just before Xmas. A sizeable group bigger than ones I have been to in the past and luckily I had been able to read the book they were discussing. As they also talked about other things they were reading and films they were watching it proved an excellent intro to some new faces. Inevitably some folks stand out: either physically, culturally, ethnically or because of some common ground or life experience which immediately becomes apparent – in this case travel.

This morning I went off to be another one of my opening doors activities, namely attending a Writing Group. I’ve  never done any creative writing before but I thought it might be a good way to stretch the brain and exercise the imagination. There was only one person there when I arrived and I recognised her from the book group. Reintroductions as we’d both forgotten names, followed by a bit of chit chat about the book the group is reading for this month’s meeting, about the writing group was followed by a slow realisation that no one else had turned up. One phone call and it was established we’d both got the starting week wrong and there wasn’t one for another 2 weeks.

Undeterred we continued chatting. I asked about how the group worked, members etc. In the end we did two writing exercises of our own devices each choosing a subject. Quite illuminating to see our different approaches and styles and to contemplate my own first output from the exercise. We then migrated to the local cafe for a cuppa, my new friend then showed me her home. An exchange of telephone numbers later and I find myself walking home an unbelievable 3 hours later. The world felt good.

Strange Meeting by Susan Hill

Strange Meeting
by
Susan Hill

In her Afterword to this book, Susan Hill says that it owes nothing more than its title to Wilfred Owen’s poem of the same name, She acknowledges the coincidence thread which led her to write this novel as a means of putting to bed, of exorcising her ghosts, as regards WW1. As a child she had learnt that her own grandmother’s only brother, Sidney Owen, killed at the Battle of the Somme; his name provided the link to the famous but unrelated poet; and later she was to discover Benjamin Britten’s work and Owen Wyngrave the hero of the Henry James short story about whom he wrote his opera. This Owen – Wyngrave circle was furthered when she sat down in Aldeburgh to write this novel, during a winter in which writing was broken up by “walks on the marshes and shingle in the bitter cold, breathing in the inspiration of Britten with the north wind”.

Once again, my reading has taken me to a book where the plot is subservient to emotional and physical landscape and character. Certainly the landscape plays a part in her novel, she describes the devastation and horrors of the trenches, of trench life, of non man’s land, but the core of the book is the relationship between two officers – David Barton and John Hilliard. Flung together as room mates in the small loft of the farmhouse serving as Battalion HQ when John returns to France after a spell at home, the two men are very different. Hilliard is reserved, introverted, from a family where show is everything; Barton is not only talkative but open and sharing of his thoughts and feelings, able to get on with everyone. Through David’s letters to and from his family, John begins to see a whole new world and way of life.

There are some strange memorable moments in the story: for example the tale of how the men in the trenches adopted, cared for, and turned on the hedgehog; how Barton madly rushed out into no man’s land to retrieve it but could not assist and left his fellow comrade to die in the field; the moment when their CO, having sealed the end to his career by speaking out against the continued orders from on high for reconnaissance raids  which he thinks “are pointless in terms of strategy and a criminal waste of men”  address his officers for the last time – a turning point for him, for them, their lives and for their war.

It is not only David’s letters which are interspersed through the novel – Hill says she read a great many memoirs, diaries and letters as part of her research – but also the arrival of Hilliard's parcels from home. Whereas David’s letters are like him, open, honest, truthful and has family’s letters similarly full of feeling, love and warmth, John’s letters, when they do come, are formal, fuelled by the false ideas circulating at home about how well the war is going and the parcels, inevitably from Fortnum’s are packed full of luxurious goods, glazed cherries and chestnuts, which again serve to show up the contrast between the apparent progression of the war and the actuality on the ground – another reminder of how the military hierarchy were struggling to deal with the anarchic novelty of trench warfare compared to the previously usual, structured, decisive cavalry type battles.

As the anniversary of The Great War approaches as I write this on January 1st 2014, I am moved to remember that in 100 years we have still not changed, we still send off our young to fight in battles on distant shores, and to lay down their lives to different weapons, used in different styles of conflict, but all with a similarity of aim, in pursuit of what we see as freedom.

ashramblings verdict: 4* There’s no dark or ghostly episode in this novel, just the all pervasive background gloom, but Hill’s writing pulls these two men from the page and this reader became utterly engrossed in them and how friendship is sewn in the most unlikeliest of places between such opposites.