When I was a child there was a small freestanding bookcase on the upstairs landing. It contained the works of Walter Scott. Over the years my mother attempted to sell these books – they were handsomely bound in leather casements and we were always short of cash – but without success. People had stopped reading Walter Scott.
Sometimes, since this this was the era before the internet and I had some time on my hands, I would pluck one of the volumes off its shelf and inspect it further. One was called ‘Woodstock’, which I found amusing. Another ‘Kenilworth’, of interest because this was the name of the next village along from where I lived.
I noticed on these occasions that the novels were heavily stained in places, perhaps water damaged. I finally got round to asking my mother why, as someone who famously took scrupulous care of her few material possessions, this was the case.
It was, I discovered, the fault of the Luftwaffe. On the night of November 14th, 1940, my mother was evacuated to her aunt’s house in nearby Leamington Spa, which was just as well, because that night saw the blitz on Coventry. By the next morning my mother’s home, along with 4,300 others had been destroyed. Two thirds of the city’s buildings were damaged. At the time of the blitz she was ten years old.
I would ordinarily say I can only imagine what it must have been like to return to the place where your house had stood the day before only to find it detsroyed, but that’s not true. My mother, quite understandably, needed no second invitation to recall that awful morning. Human nature being what it was, every time her mother and brother returned to the property to retrieve what they could, the looters had got there first.
The crowning element of her narrative was always the prodigal return of one of her cats who had somehow survived the night. The other one did not.
The reason I bring this up is because citizens of Ukraine are undergoing the same old wretched story right now, their homes reduced to rubble. Tragically, these events cast a very long, very dark shadow. Left homeless and forced to stay with relatives, already having lost her father before the war began, my mother’s uncertain existence began. I get the sense that the small family of three never really recovered from the mental shock. My mother’s mother died just a few years after the war ended. My mother, quite apart from a very long list of medical problems which eventually led to a relatively early death in her fifties, was a bundle of nerves her whole life.
Quite why my mother or her mother decided to retrieve and keep the Walter Scott novels is a little mysterious. The looters had certainly not been interested. But, maybe it meant a lot to the grandmother I never met.
So this episode, dedicated to everyone in Ukraine, is an attempt to humanise the musicians and artists of that country as something more than victims. I’m sure you’ll enjoy their efforts.
Tracklist:
Takataka, Slava Dyadyun
Ocean, The Pleroma
Glass, Smurno
Plastic, Palindrome
Rozy, Dakh Daughters
Davni Chasy, The Wedding Present
Plasticine dream, Stereopalto
Ni, Kurs Valut
Salt, Zetetics
Ya buv, ty bula, Peredmova
On this side, The room without sun
Hello ocean, Make like a tree
Ash earth, Morwan