← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Dec 24, 2011
00:28:14
A dead man's suitcase in Cape Town transports Tim Butcher from today's Africa via War...
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Transcript12 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello, this is the. From our own correspondent office at Bush House, we have a daily edition on the BBC World Service, but this is a download of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's presented by Kate Ady.
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B
Today, in deference to the season of goodwill to all men and women, we take a look at parts of the news agenda which might otherwise go unreported. The jokes that correspondents don't get to tell. A shiver of excitement during a night at the opera in Odessa. A search for a vengeful idol in the foothills of the Himalayas. And a tale of art, bravery and love in the hills of Tuscany. It's been an extraordinary year for news. 12 months in which in many places in North Africa and the Middle east, the old order has been overthrown. The change came about through people power, by sheer numbers turning out to make their views known, or as a result of a long and bloody struggle. It has, of course, presented our correspondence with a variety of challenges. But it's a year they'll never forget. Alan Little says that if there's one frustration in covering the big news events, it's that reporters sometimes can't pass on the most telling lines. They hear those which come in the form of a joke.
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C
We were taking a break from the tumult of the Arab Spring in a small Gulf state. We were at lunch. Oh, good. A colleague said. There's an item on this menu that will enable me to illustrate one of my favourite phenomena. The untranslatable joke. I collect, he said, jokes that can't be translated from English into any other language. The waiter approached. Tell me, my colleague said, what is cassoulet? It's been stew, sir, the waiter said. I don't care what it's been, my friend replied, scrupulously polite. I want to know what it is now. And so we took to a lunchtime dialogue on the nature of humor and its relationship with world events. In adversity, people take refuge in humour. They use it as a defense against attack. There's a story about the mother of the former US President, Jimmy Carter. When her son was running for president, she welcomed one of the country's top political journalists warmly into her humble farmhouse home in Georgia. During the interview, Mrs. Carter laughed and said, oh, that was only one of Jimmy's little lies. Lies, Said the hot shot reporter. Jimmy tells lies, does he? Mrs. Carter, suddenly alarmed, tried to row back. Well, only little white lies, my dear. And what exactly is a white lie? Asked the reporter, smelling blood. Well, you remember when you arrived today, and I said, What a pleasure it was to welcome you into my humble Georgia home, said Mrs. Carter. White lie he humor helps people make sense of their predicament. It salvages a modicum of freedom in unfree societies. During the meteoric rise to power of the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, the shops of Belgrade took to hanging portraits of the new leader in their windows. A cartoon in an opposition paper had Milosevic staring bleakly at his own image and asking the picture plaintively, what will become of us? The portrait replies, with uncanny prescience, as it would turn out. Well, one day they'll take me down and hang you. Milosevic was to die in a prison cell in the Hague, on trial for crimes against humanity. At the height of the war in Bosnia, I attended a rally in the Serbian capital, Belgrade. The speakers attacked Germany, the Great Satan of contemporary Europe. Russia, the historic protector of the Slavs, was lauded and sanctified. Later I was buying petrol on the black market, negotiating a price in, of course, German marks. Shouldn't you guys be doing this deal in rubles in the spirit of Pan Slav harmony? I asked. The reply was instant. Hey, we may be crazy, but we're not stupid. For a time I lived in South Africa, the last of the uncompromising defenders of white supremacy and apartheid. PW Berta had been in power for years. He was ill and the country was in turmoil. Everyone, even his closest supporters, knew it was time for him to go. He alone failed to see it. In a cartoon in a daily newspaper, PW is depicted on the balcony of the presidential residence. He's looking down at a vast sea of little faces stretching to every horizon. What's that? PW Asks an aide. It's the people, sir, the aide replies nervously. The They've come to say goodbye. Why? He replies. Where are they going? And this is where humor starts to become truly dangerous. Dictators and authoritarian leaders can withstand criticism, hatred, denunciation. But ridicule is truly corrosive. I was in Romania on Christmas Day, 1989, the day communism collapsed with the deaths of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena. You know, a young man at a radio station told me. In 1978, the Ceausescus went to London on a state visit. Ceausescu didn't speak English, but he learned a short speech in English phonetically and read it out at a banquet. Speaking of the year of the communist takeover in Romania, he told the audience, in 1948, our country stood on the edge of the abyss. And then we took a giant Step forward. It remains my favorite mixed metaphor. What a moment this was after the violence, the gunfire in the streets, the terror. This was liberation itself, expressed not as uproar, not as popular turmoil, but in a moment of humor and the freedom at last to tell a subversive joke.
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B
Alan Little the name Kathmandu conjures up a variety of romantic images. Many people will picture the city as some kind of mystical Shangri La, perched high up in the clouds amid the peaks of the high Himalayas. Perhaps their impressions have been shaped by an old music hall poem from a hundred years ago that tells the tale of a one eyed yellow idol that lives to the north of this city in Nepal. This little idol is also mentioned by John Lennon in his song Nobody Told Me so it lives on. But like that idea of Shangri La, is it purely fiction or is it based on fact? Joanna Jolly has been trying to find out.
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D
There's a one eyed yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu. There's a little marble cross below the town, and a broken hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew while the yellow God forever gazes down. And so begins the 1911 music hall poem written by J. Milton Hayes. A tale of love, theft and tragedy in the Himalayas. I first heard it shortly before I moved to Kathmandu. My mother's friend Annie performed it at her 80th birthday party. She told me how her mother had recited it on long cold nights in Glasgow to provide entertainment before the age of television. The poem tells the tale of a young, wild British officer, Mad Carew, who's stationed in Kathmandu. One night, to impress the colonel's daughter, he steals the green eye of a little yellow idol. He returns badly injured, but the colonel's daughter refuses to accept the jewel. Later that night, the idol takes its revenge. A mad Carew is found with a knife in his chest. He's buried in a grave near the idol, and the colonel's daughter, insane with grief, tends to it for the rest of her life. Annie asked if I would find out whether there was any truth to this tale. I promised to investigate, but with the distractions of setting up life in Kathmandu, the poem soon faded from my mind. That was until I met the flamboyant character of Dhabi Bhagat. Dhabi was originally from India, the son of a military general, and he'd had the sort of upbringing which meant he spoke perfectly enunciated Queen's English. He'd moved to Nepal in the 1970s to pursue an eventful career as a journalist and restaurant owner. My dear, he told me one night over Dinner. The little yellow idol does exist. I've seen it myself. Dabi told me how he tracked down the idol to a village north of Kathmandu, Sanku. So one morning, under a sky heavy with rain clouds, I hailed a taxi and set out on my quest. That day I was lucky to find the helpful Sangam Waiba, who took my pilgrimage very seriously. We drove out of the city, negotiating our way through grinding traffic and over potholed roads until the concrete houses faded into paddy fields and swollen brown rivers. We passed piles of rotting rubbish butted up against ancient moss covered temples, and finally we reached Sanku itself. The town had been an important trading post for the Nawar tribe that had ruled Kathmandu for centuries. The elaborate stone facades in the town centre spoke of a richer, more confident era. The road stopped at the bottom of a steep hill. This temple is really in the jungle, observed Sangam, looking up at the steps that disappeared into the foliage above us. This was a good sign. The poem describes how the yellow God forever gazes down, so it made sense that he would sit at the top of a hill. We climbed up, passing by stone carvings of lions and eagles until we reached a cluster of temples. At the top, a gang of priests sat outside, playing cards. Noisily. They pointed us towards a building above them. And there, inside a soot blackened room and behind a metal grill, sat a little yellow God. I was pleased to have found him so easily. But was he the real deal? He was gold plated and sat on a podium draped in red and gold silk with offerings of flowers at his feet. He was about 3 foot tall and had a large tummy. From behind the grill it was difficult to make out his eyes, but he had a stern expression on his face. A Nepali woman entered and I asked her what she knew about the God in the cage. He's actually a goddess, she told me. It's the Tantric goddess Bajra Jogini, who's worshipped by both Hindus and Buddhists. I asked her about the eyes. You can't see them at the moment, she said. We only put her eyes in during festivals. Then we give her eyes made of silver. We carry her down to the town and people pray to her. She's very powerful. She can grant you marriage and children. So was this the little yellow God who wreaked such dreadful vengeance on mad Karoo? And if so, where was the one remaining green eye? The woman didn't know. Sangam and I left the temple and wandered back down the steps. On the way down, we asked the card playing priests if they knew how old the goddess was. As old as creation, came the reply. As we walked back to the car, I wondered if there was a marble cross marking the grave of a British officer hidden somewhere among the stone carvings and jungle vines, and whether it had ever been tended to by a broken hearted woman under the constant gaze of the little yellow God.
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B
And that's Joanna Jolly. Odessa in Ukraine was once one of the great cities of Europe. Back in the 19th century it was a rich trading post noted for its opulent boulevards and Mediterranean architecture. A place where fortunes in trade and banking were made and lost. It suffered heavy casualties and damage during the Second World War and later became one of the Soviet Union's key ports. Today, slowly, the city is reinventing itself. But through all the changes Odessa has seen over the years, Petroch Trelawny says it always had one constant that was a passion for music.
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E
It took some time to win over the attendant in the ticket booth at the Odessa Opera House. Knit, she responded, not looking up when I asked if she spoke English. Peering through the tiny window, I could see she was glamorously dressed in a leopard skin jacket and matching blouse. She wore gold spectacles, the shape of her lips carefully picked out in liner. I tried a few phrases from the back of my guidebook. Still, she kept her head down, busily sorting a mass of perforated paper tickets for the evening show Traviata Tonight. I persevered. This she couldn't deny, and finally waived a ticket priced at 25 hryvnia, the Ukrainian currency. But there were two of us, and I wanted better seats. Eventually, after much pointing, we settled on a box in the first tier for which she charged me 300 Hrivnir £24. The deal done, she gave me a reluctant smile and sent me on my way. Odessa is a small city with a population of about a million. Yet despite cuts to cultural funding in the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the city fathers still managed to maintain a symphony orchestra and full time opera and ballet companies. The latter are housed in a quite remarkable theatre built in the 1880s. It's a building that radiates confidence and success. Gold leaf wraps its way round a grand staircase. Plaster friezes cover the walls. High above the main entrance stands a statue of Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, drawn in a chariot hauled by four panthers. But the grandeur of the opera house is far from unique in Odessa. When the French Duke de Richelieu became governor of the Young City in 1803, he he determined to make it a place of distinction, he planned civic buildings to impress. A system of wide boulevards was laid out, lined with trees to combat the naturally dusty air. Grain exports soon made Odessa rich, a sort of Hong Kong of its time, with its vast Black Sea port becoming key to imperial Russian trade. As the sun set, I strolled along Primorsky Boulevard, the elegant promenade that runs above the seafront. A brash wedding party drove up and down in a white stretched limousine. Two uniformed naval cadets, a boy and a girl, took pictures of each other eating ice creams. The buildings on the boulevard are in pristine condition, having been left to crumble quietly for nearly a century. Like many of Odessa's fine mansions, they've now been restored, save for an ugly 1970s cruise ship terminal at the foot of the famous Potemkin Steps. The there's little here of the Soviet sprawl that defines so many other former Eastern bloc cities. At the end of the 19th century, as much as a third of Odessa's population was Jewish. Its synagogues had a reputation for the quality of their music, and young Jewish musicians found there were plenty of opportunities. This was the city of the celebrated violinists Nathan Milstein and David Oistrach, of pianists Emil Gillels and Shura Czechosylla. It was in the ornate Opera House in 1930 that the piano legend Sviatoslav Richter began his career as a 15 year old staff accompanist. Despite the proliferation of kosher food stalls and yamulke wearing students around the main synagogue, nowadays the Jewish community is measured in tens rather than hundreds of thousands. But the city's musical life lives on. At the opera house, I feel a shiver of excitement as a grinning babushka uses a huge key to unlock the door of my box. Inside the auditorium, even more gold leaf and a vast chandelier illuminating a jewel box of a theatre. Its acoustic is particularly fine as well, amplifying both the singers voices and the mobile phones of fellow audience members ringing with abandon despite instructions in three languages to turn them off. Local opera lovers glare at the miscreants, some of whom are embarrassed, though most continue texting and a few even persist in holding whispered conversations. This performance of Verdi's popular opera has real spirit and energy, despite the odd moment when the hard working company singers gaze hopefully towards the prompt box at the front of the stage, seeking help with their lines. The staging was far from cutting edge, reliant on painted backdrops that would only be used in the west now in an ironic way, but it absolutely caught the sense of faded elegance and history ever present in Odessa. Violetta, the lead character, throws a lavish party in the first act as frock coated gentlemen bowed and crinoline wearing ladies sipped stage champagne. It was impossible not to reflect on the glory days of this port city and wonder if they might slowly be returning.
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B
Petroch Trelawney in Odessa. The British may well consider that they are the dog's best friends, but perhaps the hounds of France would beg to differ, particularly those who are resident in the capital. For Parisians love their dogs and they don't believe in leaving them at home. You see them everywhere, even being fed choice morsels in the city's celebrated restaurants. Joanna Robertson reckons nowhere in the world are pets more pampered.
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There are hundreds of thousands of dogs in Paris. They can be chosen from puppy shop windows or ordered from countryside breeders. They're seen travelling about the city, nestled amongst the groceries and shopping trolleys, or peering out of handbags. Dogs perch on the running boards of mopeds, ears flying in the wind, or sit swathed in blankets in bicycle baskets. They're petted on the bus, the tram and metro, and for a €5.10 flat rate ticket, the smaller ones can escape the metropolis and take the train to anywhere in France. When on all four bores, dogs in Paris can choose from 72 gardens to walk in, from formal palace grounds to tiny urban squares. In between, they mark lamp posts, trees, ornamental masonry and the corners of Art Nouveau metro stations to their heart's content. Paris dogs snooze under cafe tables, sit politely in restaurants. They're allowed into shops even when officially not, and from time to time sneak into cinemas, usually for a matinee on a wet afternoon. Every dog has its own preferred vet. There are hundreds to choose from. Every vet has a preferred dog diet calves liver braised, a little blanc de poulet, white chicken meat or a slice of rare roast beef. What goes in must come out. And Paris dogs apparently drop 20 tonnes of crottes de chiens, dog poo, on the city streets each day. Although who exactly weighs it remains a question that even the Hotel de Ville, the Town hall, cannot answer. These crottes de chiens cost an estimated 9 million euros a year to clear up. Successive Paris mayors have tried at times frantically to tackle the problem which is of more concern to citizens than that of violent crime, but seemingly to no avail. From time to time, the city's more creative residents have used the croat as pavement art, sticking them with coloured flags, photographing or painting them. Frederic sweeps the streets in the Montparnasse district. When asked why there's such a problem, he shrugs. Je c' est pas, I've no idea. We used to have motorised vacuum cleaners, Les motau crottes. But they've all gone. Now we have these. He waggles a pair of long handled tongs. Pain Sas. Crotte. Poop. Pincers. Fiddly they are. Usually we simply swish it in the gutter. It's a sociable life, a dog's life in Paris, with so many other dogs to meet, greet and play with. Throughout the city, dogs must be kept on a lead. But in the Jardin de Tuileries, they are allowed to run free. Along the tree lined borders of these palace grounds where dogs have been walked since the 17th century, glossy afghan hounds with jewelled collars sport with feisty Jack Russells, French bulldogs and diminutive Chihuahuas in little outdoor coats. Just across the river Sense, at the bottom of a private garden lies the grave of Coco, a little Papillon dog, the last beloved pet of Queen Marie Antoinette, who lived on pining after his mistress's execution in the French Revolution. In another palace garden, the Jardin de Luxembourg, dogs kept strictly on a lead, walk under the chestnut trees and regulars gather to talk. It was here that I heard of a clandestine ritual confided to me by the mistress of a small black and white crossbreed. The furtive scattering of ashes, the last remains of cremated pet dogs on the limpid waters of the celebrated Medici fountain. A wonderful way to say farewell, she said. When the park keepers aren't looking, of course. Paris dogs have had their own Cemetery since 1899. Beneath a bridge of roaring traffic on a small island in the River Seine lies a tranquil haven. Step through the exquisite gates to where the graves are small and fascinating. Here lies Rin Tin Tin, legendary star of the silent screen, laid to rest in his native French soil. Rescued from a World War I battlefield by a US army cadet, Rin Tin Tin went on to star in 23 Hollywood movies before dying in 1932 in Los Angeles in the arms of the actress Jean Harlow, there's a monument to a St Bernard Barry who saved 40 lives but died saving the 41st. And to Moustache, mascot of Napoleon's great army, killed in Spain in 1811. Here lies Drac, who comforted his mistress, the Princess of Romania, twice exiled, divorced and lonely in Paris. Here lie marquise and tony dogs of the beautiful Russian princess Lobanoff. Here lie the graves of a myriad Paris dogs My darling Minouche, faithful Belle, dear pompom cherie Harry is buried along with his favourite tennis balls. Rosie's grave is marked with a rose bush. And Here lies Emma, 1889-1900, whose mistress mourned the loss of my only friend in my misled and sorry life.
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B
And that was Joanna Robertson in Paris. The town of Sansepolcro lies on the banks of the River Tiber in central Italy. The area was the cradle of the early Renaissance and the town itself, the birthplace of one of the period's great figures, the painter Piero della Francesca. It's also home to one of his greatest masterpieces. But during World War II, as the Allied armies fought their way up the spine of Italy, the town became a battleground and that famous painting was nearly lost forever. Tim Butcher's been learning more about this story, not, as you might imagine, amid the rolling countryside of Tuscany, but 5,000 miles away in South Africa.
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A
I opened a dead man's suitcase in Cape Town and was transported from today's Africa via World War II Italy to Renaissance Tuscany. Inside, I found a story of high art, bravery and love, all the more powerful because it's a story not widely known. I was on Long Street, a boisterous city centre shopping artery, exploring the upper floors of Clarke's, a venerable bookshop staffed by bibliophiles who lovingly tend roof high displays of new titles. Climb up the stairs at the back and you enter a bookie world almost extinct in today's era of online search engine rigour. Here, second hand works await discovery, all meticulously catalogued, some preciously protected in glass fronted cabinets. Staff to and fro across creaking floorboards and up half sets of stairs linking a maze of attics, all crowded with books. Graham Greene was my research target. More specifically, his links with Tony Clark, founder in 1956 of what is arguably Africa's finest bookshop. Clark died in the 1980s, but his erudite successor, Henrietta Dax, allowed me to look through his remaining papers. Higgledy piggledy in a brown leather case of green, I found nothing. But as so often with research, the letters, notebooks, diaries and photographs drew me off down another thrillingly unexpected byway. The records were of a man who came of age in the Second World War. There were doodled maps of El Alamein and photographs of Clark as a young subaltern sitting smartly to attention in the Middle east in 1942 alongside fellow members of the Royal Horse Artillery. The RHA is one of the Army's Smartest units, its gunners fire the ceremonial salutes in Hyde park, and Clark belonged to its oldest battery, the Chestnut Troop. Its fighting tradition is proud, no more so than against Rommel's Africa Corps. And later, on the long Allied slog up Italy, the snapshots of Clark's campaign are framed in black and white. Here, lean, sun tanned Tommies lark about on a Mediterranean beach. There, stones ring the grave of a fellow officer, a chum on an Italian hillside. A reconnaissance photograph of Monte Cassino shocks me. Clark was not involved in the fight to dislodge the Germans from its hilltop monastery. But in his diary he describes how shocked he was as he drove underneath ancient walls, hideously disfigured by bombardment. It may have influenced what Clark went on to do. As the Allied advance continued, his unit took up a firing position near the town of San Sepolcro. Unlike other famous Tuscan towns that are perched on hilltops, it lies down in a valley. I went there myself in the 1990s and found its location memorably unmemorable. It was standard then for Allied artillery to soften up towns before ground troops went in. And Clark was the officer responsible for Sansepolcro. His guns dug themselves into their firing pits. His gunners prepared their ammunition stocks. But then some faint bell rang in his mind. A bell belonging to an age far from the madness of war. Clarke English Gay Art Loving remembered an essay by Aldous Huxley. The author had not been shy with his superlatives, saying he had discovered what he called the world's best, best picture in florid terms. Huxley's essay described the incredible power of the Resurrection, a fresco masterpiece by the Renaissance maestro, Piero della Francesca. We need no imagination to help us figure forth its beauty, Huxley wrote. It stands there before us in entire and actual splendor, the greatest picture in the world. Clark may not have remembered every detail of the essay, but. But just as his gun started firing, he remembered one key fact. The Resurrection was located in San Sepolcro. I can only imagine the risk he then took by withholding his order to fire. He later said his commanding officer had come on the radio urging him to get on with it. So he had to stall for time, peering at the town through binoculars and assuring his commander that he could see no German targets to go after. It was a brave action. Had Allied infantry been ambushed as they advance on Sansepolcro, his court martial would have been brutal. But for the love of art, he kept the guns silent. The Germans fled and the town was liberated the following day without any damage to the 500 year old work of art. As I left his shop, I thought of Clark. Nowadays such an act would be spread across newspapers and picked up by script writers. But all that remains today is a Sansepolcro suburban street named in his honour, a few references in travelogues written long after the war, and a suitcase of memories at the foot of Africa.
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B
Tim Butcher in Cape Town, where, incidentally, they're definitely not expecting a white Christmas. The forecasters say it'll be 32 degrees and sunny all day. That's it. I'll be back next Saturday morning with more from our own correspondence. Until then, goodbye.