REFLECTIONS ON WRITING

On my last night in London a friend from California, the writer Julia Halprin Jackson, urges me to face the ultimate challenge: to participate in a blog-hop in which a series writers give away the little secrets of their trade by answering a few questions. Being a rookie in the writing world, I feel really honoured to have been selected to join this project. I met Julia in 2006, when she was working as a language assistant in a primary school near Fuengirola. At the time I was leading a bilingual drama workshop with a wonderful Spanish teacher, Pilar Andújar, and soon Julia became one of our main assets. I will always remember her with her little notebook, writing down all the words and expressions that came up in our conversations. We have been in touch since then and she has been a constant collaborator of COLLAGEmagazine (watch out for our next memory issue, she has contributed with a most amazing story in which she pays homage to her grandmother, Amah).

Julia is an accomplished writer: her work has appeared in West Branch Wired, California Northern, Fourteen Hills, Flatmancrooked, Sacramento News & Review, Fictionade, Fiction365, Catalyst and Spectrum, as well as selected anthologies. Julia has been awarded scholarships from the Tomales Bay Writer’s Workshops and the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and earned an M.A. in Creative Writing (fiction) from UC Davis. She lives in Northern California with Ryan, her fiance, where she co-founded and co-curates Play On Words, a collaborative literary performance series. And on top of all this, she’s working on her first novel, which is set in Southern Spain. You can learn more about julia at  http://juliahalprinjackson.com

So here’s my little contribution to this blog-hop:

What am I working on?

This year in London has been a source of inspiration. I began this blog as part of my project for the European Commission and what started like a sort of “obligation” has become a real pleasure. Thus, even if my Grundtvig assistantship expires today, my intention is to carry on adding entries to this blog. Apart from this, I have been in charge of editing and coordinating the next issue of COLLAGE magazine, which is devoted to the topic of memory and will come out at the end of this month.

Also, I have several projects in mind. One of them is to write the texts that will accompany a book containing the amazing photographs that my partner, Lorenzo Hernández, has taken all throughout this year.

Lorenzo has always encouraged me to write, but I never knew what to write about. Now, all of a sudden, my head is full of stories and characters that are waiting to be put into paper. I don’t really know where this will lead to, but I am really looking forward to embark myself into this adventure.

How is my work different than others in its genre?

I’d say that it’s probably the fact that all what I write is intimately connected to Lorenzo’s photography. His images are always my source of inspiration, although I wouldn’t say that they rule absolutely what I write. I start with the photos and then my imagination runs free.

Having said this, I must admit that Lorenzo’s way of looking at the world through his camera, his personal view, the way he makes the most mundane things beautiful and poetic, rubs off on me a little bit. We spend most of our time talking, we started a conversation almost twenty years ago and we haven’t run out of topics yet, and I think all this food for though must show up in what I write.

How does my writing process work? 

This is a question that has always fascinated me. Do writers know how their stories finish before they start writing or do they find out as they go? Years ago I asked this question to a very dear friend, the Irish writer Siobhan Galvin. She had written two one-thousand-page novels while raising three children and she told me that she used to write every day from 12pm to 13.30, once she had finished tidying up her house and before picking up the kids from school. She never new what she was going to write, it was as if the different characters told her what was going to happen next.

My case is the opposite. I need to have a structure in my head, a scaffolding that I flesh out in several drafts. Like Julia, I like leaving the text to rest and go back to it a few days later. Sometimes I erase everything and start all over again because when I wake up in the morning I suddenly have a much better structure in my head. With the blog I know the topic I am going to write about, I have the images, but I can’t start working until I have this structure.

Why do I write what I do?

Because once I have managed to finish a piece of writing, the pleasure is immense. I have always loved the ends that promise a new beginning, like the new friendship in Casablanca. For me writing is this new beginning.

I have asked three blogger friends to carry the torch: Gloria García Ordóñez, who works as a coach, reflects about life and the human nature in her blog;  José Manuel Cruz Barragán leads a “double life” as an economist and film critic; and Joaquín García Weil is a philosopher and yoga teacher. I admire the three of them and I would like to thank them for joining me in this adventure. Their blogs are in Spanish, so I’ll leave their biographies in this language.

JOSÉ MANUEL CRUZ BARRAGÁN

Sevillano de nacimiento y malagueño de adopción. Aunque mi titulación dice que soy Licenciado en Económicas y Master en Administración de Empresas, al mismo tiempo también me apasionan el cine y la literatura. De acuerdo con ello, llevo una "doble" vida en que, por un lado, soy consultor empresarial y asesor financiero independiente y, por otro, soy escritor. En 2013, publiqué mi primera novela, Sin tregua se consumían nuestros ojos, que, espero, tenga continuación en breve. Actualmente, soy el autor de dos blogs: uno de economía, EL DEDO EN EL DATO (http://eldedoeneldato.blogspot.com.es) y otro de cine, EL ESPECTADOR IMPERTINENTE (http://elespectadorimpertinente.blogspot.com.es).

GLORIA GARCÍA ORDÓÑEZ

Cordo-malagueña, filóloga, formadora y coach. Anglófila, bebedora de té, practicante de yoga y entusiasta del vino tinto. Me encanta leer al sol, ver películas, reunirme con mi familia y quedar con mis amigos. Si es alrededor de una cerveza bien fría y de un plato enorme de buen jamón ibérico, mejor que mejor. Disfruto de mis momentos de llanto y aún más de los de risas. Creo que la Vida es increíblemente hermosa y que el dolor es sólo un amigo que trae un mensaje en la mochila. Tengo a la Muerte presente cada día y lo que me mueve es seguir camino mirando hacia adentro, conectando con el otro, aprendiendo y creciendo. Escribir es para mí una auto-terapia primero, y a través de mis reflexiones, nacidas de mi aprendizaje, quiero pensar que puedo aportar algo para que otras personas también avancen en su proceso de auto-descubrimiento. Escribo sobre la vida y sobre el ser humano, desde una perspectiva integradora y sistémica y dentro del marco respetuoso y ecológico que me aporta el coaching

http://www.esplingo.com/blog

JOAQUÍN GARCÍA WEIL

Joaquín García Weil, Licenciado en Filosofía, practica Yoga desde hace veinte años y lo enseña desde hace once. Es alumno del Swami Rudradev (discípulo destacado de Iyengar), con quien ha aprendido en el Yoga Study Center, Rishikesh, India. También ha estudiado con el Dr. Vagish Sastri de Benarés, entre otros maestros. Ha colaborado en Psicología Práctica, Yoga Journal (versión española) y la Revista Dharma. Ha fundado y dirige YogaSala Málaga, centro de yoga y meditación, donde enseña estas disciplinas.

http://yogasala.blogspot.com.es

AN UNCONFORTABLE TRUTH

Mati and daughters

A few years ago Lorenzo photographed a mother and two daughters for his “generations” series. Even if the daughters were in the summit of their beauty, it was the mother, who was in her mid seventies, who stood out. She had this star quality that reminded everyone of the actress Geraldine Chaplin. However, when she saw herself in the portrait, she hated it and she said she didn’t know she looked so old. His daughter, who had commissioned the portrait, displayed it in her apartment, nonetheless. It was not until dozens of people had praised the photo that she started to appreciate it.

This is not news for Lorenzo; we have learned to accept that people feel uncomfortable when seeing their portraits for the first time. We also know that they will eventually grow to love them.

Mati modelling for Lorenzo in Dior

I recently listened to a radio interview with the legendary photographer David Bailey, who is currently showing a retrospective of his work at the National Portrait Gallery, and it gave me food for thought. It did not surprise me to learn that the same happens to him. He said that he loves it when someone who poses for him hates the portrait and then, twenty years later, his wife phones saying: “Do you remember that photo you took of my husband? It’s the best portrait he’s ever had. Could we have a copy now?”

Michael Caine's famous portrait opens David Bailey's Exhibition in London

Bailey tells us an anecdote about Picasso and Gertrude Stein. When she saw her portrait, she said: “ I don’t look like that!” and Picasso retorted: “You will”. A good portrait shows your real self, the one that naturally emerges throughout the years.

In 1999 Bailey was photographing the singer Marianne Faithful. She was in her underwear in the process of changing clothes when he said: “Don’t move. This is the picture.” She was 53 and she looked 53, which is one of the things I love about her. He told her that he wanted to show the world that she was “Marianne Faithful” and didn’t give a monkey’s about what people thought. He took two pictures. In one of them she was serious; in the other one she was laughing. She hated the second one. It was not the fact that the photo showed her mature body; in this sense both photos were identical. It was the grin, with a hint of madness, which upset her. The second photo somehow announced the decadence of the mind, something that terrifies all of us.

It’s easy to please a model: a little bit of photo editing and you are as good as new. It requires boldness to show the poser’s inner self. It also demands the gift to connect with the person that hides behind the mask. Bailey said that doing a portrait is a mode of communication. I cannot agree more. Lorenzo does exactly the same: he talks to the model and clicks, and that’s the picture. He doesn’t need to think about what he’s going to do, it just happens. He says it’s as if it was the unconscious that took the picture.

It’s funny to think that men normally accept this sort of exposure more than women. I wonder why. I am a bit like Marianne Faithful. I have no problems with him photographing my body, but it takes me a while to see my face as it is reflected by the camera. I always look too anxious. Again, this is a reflection of my character: I worry too much. On the other hand, when I look at the first portraits he took of me, I really like what I see, and I have come to accept that this is what will happen to the current ones, eventually.

In a world where digital cameras and photo editing software have made photography accessible to everybody, where it’s so easy to show who you would like to be, not who you are, we really need artists who have the bravery and the talent to reveal people’s inner selves.

You can visit David Bailey’s Stardust at the National Portrait Gallery until 1^st June 2014.

You can listen to Tim Marlow interviewing David Bailey for BBC radio at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03phd4f/Getting_the_Picture_The_Camera_Has_Attitudes/

To see Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein click here

To see David Bailey’s portrait of Marianne Faithful, click here 

Photography: Lorenzohernandez                                      www.photolorenzohernandez.com

A SONG LIKE A RIVER

A few days ago, Lorenzo found a small jewel in Televisión Española’s website, a programme devoted to a song I used to listen to when I was about twenty, Gabinete Caligari’s Camino Soria (The Way To Soria). In this programme the presenter, Juan Carlos Ortega, offers us a delightful twenty-minute piece of reminiscence. As he tracks the history of the song, he embarks on a personal journey: he recognizes places he used to visit, remembers a girl who rejected him, and he even meets one of my generation’s national heroes, the legendary National Radio DJ Jesús Ordovás.

Ordovás accurately defines Camino Soria as a song-river, because it’s like a flow that carries you downhill. It tells the story of a man who has been abandoned by the woman he loves and decides to embark on a journey to Soria, a small town on the banks of the River Duero in the cold lands of Castilla. Soria has strong links with the poets Machado and Becquer, but Gabinete’s lead singer, Jaime Urrutia, confesses that they chose the name because it rhymed with history (historia), glory (gloria) and memory (memoir).

The programme ends with Juan Carlos and Jaime sitting together on a wooden bench next to the river Duero. Jaime takes the guitar he has been carrying the entire journey out of its case and starts strumming the chords, singing the first lines of the song. Juan Carlos joins him. They sing slightly out of key and Jaime sometimes forgets the chords, but Juan Carlo’s face reflects the joy of reminiscence.

A few weeks ago I had a similar experience along Regent’s Canal. This is one of the most enjoyable walks in London. It was a day that announced spring, the sun was shining brightly for the first time in months and there was an atmosphere of anticipation. We started near King’s Cross, next to the site of Central Saint Martins, one of the best arts and design schools in the world. The building is located in a square covered with little fountains that throw jets of water into the air. There was a group of children in their swimsuits jumping about with contagious thrill. On the terraces that lead to the canal groups of young people were basking in the early spring sun.

Our walk along the Canal was like Camino Soria; we just went with the flow and observed what we found along the way: we came across a young man who had prepared a barbeque receiving his first guest, several couples holding hands, a group of boys having a row under one of the bridges... There were houses whose gardens led to the canal and barges where people lived. 

Some areas were busy and noisy, like the stretch that crosses Camden Lock, and others were peaceful and silent. 

When we reached Regent’s Garden, we saw the back of the aviary from the zoo and when we finally reached little Venice, we found a harbour full of barges that looked like a little village. 

We were about to reach the end of our walk, which lasted for more than four hours, when we came across a huge blackboard with the words “BEFORE I DIE...” written a hundred times. There were pieces of chalk for those who wanted to write a message. In the spur of the moment, I scrawled the first thing that came to my mind: “I want to meet Paul Weller”.

For me Paul Weller was the beginning of all. I was an 11-year-old when I listened to “Going Underground” for the first time. This song was like an epiphany, a sudden realization that there was a world beyond my little life in a town in Southern Spain in 1980. Music has played a key role in my life since then.

When we left the Canal in Little Venice, we walked down the street, crossed it and... guess who was on the other side, holding the hand of a little boy? Paul Weller.

You can watch “La mitad invisible: Camino Soria” at http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/la-mitad-invisible/mitad-invisible-camino-soria/1629082/

You can watch the video “Going Underground” at  http://youtu.be/AE1ct5yEuVY

By the way,  do you recognize the poster in the background?

Photos: Lorenzohernandez                                         www.photolorenzohernandez.com

THE RANK STENCH OF THOSE BODIES

Detail of Charles Sergeant Jagger's "No Man's Land"

At the beginning of November 2012 I had the opportunity to attend the celebration of Remembrance Day at the English Cemetery in Malaga, the oldest non-Roman Catholic Christian cemetery in mainland Spain, and I must say it was an impressive experience to stand in silence in the middle of the tombs covered with little white crosses and wreaths made with poppies. Not many Spanish people know about this tradition, which has its origin in the very end of World War I. The hostilities ended “at the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month” of 1918. Since 1919, a two-minute silence is held in Britain to pay homage to those who died in that war and in subsequent conflicts. People also wear poppies in their lapels, a tradition that has its origin in the poppies that bloomed in the battlefields and the poem that John McCrae dedicated to them, “In Flanders Fields”. 

This year commemorates the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, a tragedy that shaped the future of Modern Britain. Contrary to other historical events, the spirit of this war is still alive and tangible in this country, something that took me by surprise, as I hardly remembered the list of dates and battles I had been fed in high school: le Somme, Ypres, Gallipoli, Passchendaele…

World War I started to take shape in my conscience as something real, lived by real people, when I read this passage in Andrew Marr’s “The Making of Modern Britain”, a description of the salient of Ypres by a journalist, Philip Gibbs:

“a sea of red liquid mud composed of brick dust and bodies, bits of bodies, and clots of blood, and green metallic-looking slime, made by explosive gasses... Human flesh, rotting and stinking, mere pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they dug to get deeper cover, their shovels went into the softness of dead bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs, blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling over them when the enemy trench-mortared their position.”

I would like to illustrate this passage with a work by Charles Sargeant Jagger,   a bronze frieze titled “No Man’s Land” which shows a man hiding among the corpses of his comrades. You can find it at the Tate Britain.

Then I watched the magnificent series of documentaries by Jeremy Paxman “Britain’s Great War”, which gave me a new and more human insight of this conflict: the memory of being shelled by German boats in the middle of the night shared by a one hundred and five year old lady who survived the Hartlepool raid at the age of seven; the posters of Kitcheners’ appeal for volunteers that managed to recruit two and a half million men for the British army; the doctor from New Zealand who restored the facial injuries of disfigured soldiers and created the basis for modern plastic surgery in a hospital in Sidcup, a short bus ride from where I live; how Britain managed to face the shortage of manpower by involving women into the war effort and how many of these women died of poisoning working in munitions; the first conscientious objectors and the increasing gap between those who fought the war and those who sent them to the trenches…

Let’s take a short walk around Central London and find the traces the first modern conflict has left in this city.

Our journey begins at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. It’s a key landmark in the commemoration of the dead in the wars since 1919. On the Sunday nearest to the 11^th November a service is held, which is attended by the Queen, religious leaders, politicians, and representatives of the armed and auxiliary forces. The poppy wreaths that are deposited at the base of this monument can still be seen months afterwards. The BBC has a very interesting history section about World War I and there I learned that this monument, whose name means “empty tomb” in Greek, was originally built in wood and plaster, as it was intended to be used only at the 1919 Armistice Celebrations, but it became so popular that they had to build a permanent one in 1920.

Today is a lovely day that announces the end of winter and the street is full of colourful characters, like this group of men dressed like ludo counters. 

However, as we walk up towards Trafalgar Square, we are reminded of conflict once again. 

Not very far from the statue of Field Marshall Douglas Haig, whose strategy led to the death of so many in the Western Front, we can see a group of demonstrators trying to draw attention to the situation in Venezuela. 

Next to them there is another group of protestors against the invasion of Ucraine by Russian troops. Our walk cannot be more meaningful today.

Trafalgar square is the next point in our pilgrimage. If you had been here one hundred years ago, you would have seen placards encouraging people to buy war bonds. You would even have seen a tank, one of the main technological advances in British warfare, parked in the middle of the square. And if you had been here during the celebrations after the Armistice, you would have seen the Australian and Canadian troops making a bonfire with these placards. In the final documentary of his series, Jeremy Paxman shows a stone under Nelson’s column where you can still see the effects of this act of patriotic vandalism.

Our next stop is the National Portrait Gallery, where there is a very recommendable exhibition, “The Great War in Portraits”, which allows us to put faces to those who led and fought this war. What impressed me the most was the opening sculpture, Jacob Epstein’s “The Rock Drill”, and a wall covered with a collection of portraits of people involved in the war, famous and anonymous, allies and enemies, men and women. You can read the story behind these faces in a booklet that is provided in the gallery. 

This exhibition will be open to the public until 15^th June 2014. Whether you are planning to come to London soon or not, even if you have already been to this exhibition, it’s worth listening to the curator’s guided tour: http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/firstworldwarcentenary/curator-tour.php

I have already mentioned Charles Sargeant Jagger. If we carry on walking towards Hyde Park Corner, we will find one of his most famous works: the “Royal Artillery Memorial”, which shows four figures: a driver, an artillery captain, a shell carrier and a dead soldier covered by his own coat. The driver is wearing a cape that is being blown by the wind and when I look at him I often have the feeling of looking at the figure of an angel with its wings extended.

The next stop leads us to the other side of the park, in Marble Arch, where you can visit a monument that pays homage to all the animals that lost their lives in wars. Their role was key in the trenches: pigeons that carried messages, mules used to transport armament and munitions, war horses... Again, I remember a passage from “The Making of Modern Britain” where Andrew Marr describes some of the terrible conditions these animals lived in: mules who had their vocal chords cut for fear that their braying gave away the soldiers’ position, horses who were painted in black for the same reason... On this monument you can read the inscription “They had no choice”.

Our walk ends at the Marquis of Granby, a pub you can find behind Millbank, next to the river Thames. Here there is a corner devoted to one of the most fascinating heroes of this war: the poet Siegfried Sassoon. He was sent to the front in France, was injured and won the Military Cross. However, he decided to throw it into the Mersey estuary and stand against a war he felt pointless. His poetry describes the horrors of this war and denounces the gap between those who fought it and the callous politicians who made the decisions at home. Eventually, Sassoon decided to go back to the front in order not to abandon his comrades and was wounded again. In this corner you can find some photos, together with some original copies of his work.

I would like to finish this entry with an extract of one of Sassoon’s poems, “The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still”:

“To-night I smell the battle; miles away


Gun-thunder leaps and thuds along the ridge;

The spouting shells dig pits in fields of death,


And wounded men, are moaning in the woods.”

APPENDIX

If you want to find out more about this engaging topic, visit the BBC history website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww1

And finally, if you want to check how much you know about this event, I invite you to do this quiz: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/quiz/2013/jun/11/quiz-first-world-war

I managed to score 7 points. What about you?

Photo: Lorenzo Hernandez                                            www.photolorenzohernandez.com

A TIME CAPSULE FOR THE FUTURE GENERATIONS

A wedding album can be a powerfully evocative object. I remember the fascination I felt as I passed the tracing paper pages that protected the old black and white photographs of my parents’. Every time I opened the album it was as if I saw it for the first time: my mum wearing the wonderful silk dress my grandma had made for her, my father thin and without the moustache that would become one of his most defining features, the magnificence of the cathedral... I remember the covers were made of dark green leather and the pages inside, black and thick like cardboard.

A few months ago we celebrated a reminiscence session devoted to weddings in Camden. Shirley, one of the ladies in the group, brought a very similar album, but this time the photos showed a traditional Jewish wedding. However, the album had the same leather cover and black pages and the photos were also protected by tracing paper. Leafing through Shirley’s album I experimented the same kind of feeling, and I could also observe that she lit up explaining the different details of the images.

This is something that could be said of all the wedding photos of the time. Anita Berlin showed me a photo of her parents, Ludwig and Carmen, outside the registry office and they reminded me of the glamour of La Dolce Vita. Another good example is Fay and Tom’s wedding photos, full of the swing of the 1960s, which you can see at the top of this page.

Nowadays the feeling is almost gone; there is a lack of soul in the wedding albums, once you have seen one, you rarely feel like going through it again. It might have something to do with the fact that we are overexposed to images and by the time you see the album you have already seen the same shots one hundred times on your friends’ facebook accounts. But I am convinced it is also the professional photographers’ fault, as they fail to face the challenge of offering something truly original, something that cannot have been taken by anybody’s mobile phone camera.

The format has also something to do with this: there are photographers that cut down costs by offering just a CD with all the photos; others offer digital albums with a metallic touch; and sometimes they use digital retouching so much that the groom’s mother could be taken for the bride’s little sister. Also, the photo selection fails; often it’s the couple who do this job and as a result there is no rhythm, no story. It’s not their fault, but editing is one of the most important and difficult parts of a photographic job and it should be done by a professional. Would you handle the scalpel if you had to undergo surgery? Well, this is what people seem to do when it comes to wedding photography.

A wedding album is something that should be timeless, that should trigger memory rather than giving you the whole story (videos are meant for this, and people rarely watch a wedding video more than once). An album is an object that is not meant for the couple who order it but for their future selves and the future generations.

Lorenzo does not take many wedding assignments; most of them come to him through word-to-mouth and he sometimes documents several weddings and other events within the same family. He has a very clear idea of what a wedding album should be, a witness of the couple’s life around the time they got married: their jobs, their friends, their hobbies. With this aim in mind, he meets them several times along the year. We’ve had photo shootings in primary schools, fire stations, onion warehouses... even in the couple’s bed. We also include friends and family. The result is an album in which you can feel the soul of the people portrayed; you can see who they are, and in the future their children will see who they were.

This is a concept that we share with Juan and Sonia, who came to London last week especially for a photo shooting that will be part of their wedding album. They are getting married at the end of September and we started our project last July. We’ve had several shootings since then, involving the two of them and their two little children, Juanito and Sonia, who are going to play an essential role in the event. While having a drink on the beach after one of these shootings, we suggested that they could come do the next one in London. So they decided to come here during the half-term holidays in February instead of going to Lisbon, as it was their original plan.

We met them in front of the Big Ben and spent the day in the South Bank. At the beginning, it was a bit hard because if you look at Lorenzo’s photos, you’ll realise he has a thing for introducing an element of movement and he often uses birds for this purpose. Well, there were plenty of seagulls and birds on the riverbank, but they refused to fly on the right direction, so Juan and Sonia had to wait patiently while I tried to attract or shoo the birds away. Luckily, Lorenzo is a specialist in catching the moment.

We spent the rest of the day making the most of the wonderful locations in the area: the Undercroft, the National Theatre, the Tate Modern, the Millennium Bridge... But my favourite place is by far the beach you can find in the riverbank when the tide is low. There you can see the rests of London’s medieval past, which is hidden almost everywhere else. Going down the stairs that lead to this beach is like stepping back in time and the magic in the atmosphere is undeniable. Here is where Lorenzo took some of the best pictures of the couple.

To finish the day, Juan suggested that we drink a pint of Nicholson’s at the Blackfriar, a cosy pub situated under the bridge of the same name. It was just what we needed after a long day of work, almost eight hours.

I don’t know how to define Lorenzo’s wedding albums; they contain elements of fashion and street photography and when you look at them you can really feel love and positivity. Something that confirms that we are doing the right thing is what Sonia told us at the end of the day: she caught their five-year-old son taking pictures of his toys

 and when she asked him what he was doing, he said: “I am taking pictures like Lorenzo.”

Photos making of: Marta Moreno                         www.photolorenzohernandez.com

THE BEVIN BOY AND THE SMOKING POTS IN THE OLD BREWERY

Fay and Tom met while they were working at Truman’s Brewery in Brick Lane in the nineteen sixties, when Truman was the last major independent brewery in London. They have been together since then. 

Tom was one of the Bevin boys during the Second World War. The Bevin boys were young men who were conscripted to work in the coalmines. The programme was named after Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour and National Service in the wartime coalition government. The work conditions could be as terrible as being in the front, but contrary to what happened to soldiers, nobody recognised their contribution to victory until 1995. In 2007 the British Government decided that these men would receive a Veterans Badge. Tom received his recently and now he wears it proudly on his lapel.

Fay is a very lively woman who sings, dances and performs. She’s also got a great sense of humour. Fay showed me their wedding photo; the smile on her face is unmistakable: Tom was the man of her life. Here you can see these images, together with a poem she wrote herself a few months ago, which ends with these wise words:

“Baby, childhood, teenage years

                                      all gone

   30, 40, 50, 60 70 years, will I

                                      carry on?

                  Bet your life I will.”

If Fay and Tom haven’t changed so much, the brick building which used to be the site of this famous brewery can’t be more different. Truman closed in 1989, but the Eagle that was the symbol of the company is still up there, looking at the groups of young people, tourists and street artists that fill the area every Sunday afternoon. The brewing machinery is not there anymore and the place has been taken over by an exciting street market. 

When you arrive at Brick Lane all your senses become alert. First, you hear the siren songs of the owners of the curry houses that line the street, trying to attract prospective clients by offering them an incomparable culinary experience for only ten pounds. Then, as you approach the brewery, the smell of spices and exotic dishes fills your nostrils. And as you enter the old building, you can feel the heat of the boiling pots in the stalls. All the world cuisine is represented here: Turkish, Vietnamese, Greek, Thai, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Lithuanian, you name it. 

And all of a sudden you are starving, longing to buy some vegetable stew with noodles or perhaps a combined Turkish plate. It’s hard to choose and you tell to yourself that you will return next Sunday to try what you couldn’t eat today. Everybody here is carrying a tin foil little tray or a paper plate, eating and talking and laughing.

This is a good opportunity to have a conversation with some of the cooks, like a couple of Italians who are about to open their own restaurant in London and who make a mean lasagna, just like the one that la mamma cooks back in Rome. 

Now it’s time to walk around and look at the people who fill the market. The mixture of cultures and races is everywhere, which is one of the beauties of this city. The atmosphere is friendly and relaxed.

I decide to stop at a small stall that sells old spectacles and I try on a few. Some of them are really beautiful, like a butterfly frame from the 1950s, but they look fragile and I have to wear very expensive lenses, so getting them is out of the question. A couple of Spanish girls stop next to me and start taking selfies wearing different glasses, ignoring the notice that asks people not to do so. The person in charge tells them something about it, but they just say “Thank you” and ignore what she has said. I pretend to be Russian.

Lorenzo, who has been walking around taking photos, joins me and we walk to a stall that sells second hand clothes. There is a wonderful green leather jacket for ten pounds, which he buys. Carla is looking for a dress for a party.

We leave the brewery and walk round the corner into Rough Trade Records. This is a paradise for me. I put on a pair of headphones and listen to the CDs on display. I write down some names to check out later, like an atmospheric song called Hey Now by a band called London Grammar. As I listen to the music I look at the walls of this shop, covered with old concert flyers. There is also a book section with places to seat and leaf through, another beauty of London (you can do this in most bookshops, something that makes you  feel  really grateful on a rainy day).

We end up drinking some coffee at cafe 1001, which has a different DJ in each room, and finish the day with a short walk. This will bring more surprises, like a man playing a ragtime tune in an old piano in a junk shop.

It’s dark and we walk back to the DLR station. Another dark Sunday evening in London, as dark as the coalmine galleries of the Bevin boys.

Photos: Lorenzo Hernandez                                                          www.photolorenzohernandez.com