Katherine Mansfield
7 January
Almost themed, one could say, in Calderonia, Cambridge academic Ruth Scurr has written a meaty review in today’s Spectator of Claire Harman’s experiment in biography All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything. Anyone who writes short stories should know Mansfield’s work intimately. But I am not sure that I agree with this Scurr/Harman statement: ‘In our age of pandemics, loneliness and an overwhelming number of texts online, Harman suggests, appreciation of short stories — which ask “the biggest questions in the smallest spaces” — is burgeoning.’ I can’t say I have noticed such a burgeoning. The problem, surely, is that word ‘overwhelming’. I have posted a few of my old ‘piffle’ stories on Calderonia, and admit it’s a terribly convenient way of putting short stories ‘out there’. But given the ‘overwhelming’ nature of the Web, can many, if any, short stories get noticed? Are that many writers bothering, then? The days when many more writers than Chekhov could publish a story a week in a newspaper, or Mansfield regularly publish in literary magazines, and get paid a living wage for it, are gone forever.
My publishing project this year is a book of twenty of my short stories, old and new, 60% of which are written. Maybe Harman’s words have encouraged me to preview some new ones online fresh from the oven… It needs thinking about.
14 January
Paranoia apart, it’s my considered view that Calderonia was shut down yesterday by a Russian hacker. The Russian end of Sam&Sam had committed himself to a much longer and franker thread than usual — which I diminuendoed back to silence as fast as I could. Shortly afterwards, a view from Russia popped up on ‘Statistics’, despite the fact that the people I know in Russia can’t access Calderonia. By the evening, Calderonia was ‘unavailable’ worldwide, although of course I did not notice this immediately. My guess is that someone in Russia was researching (not for the first time?) who I am, and discovered my take on Ukraine. Ostensibly, the problem was that the server security certificates of some strands of patrickmileswriter.co.uk had expired. We have never had this problem in nine years, however. Why it should have happened now and triggered unavailability was not really clear. My own theory is that disabling or ‘enforcing’ some of these security certificates was the only way a hacker could shoot us down, given that WordPress’s cyber defences seem state of the art. Fortunately, Calderonia’s own IT expert (aka Jim Miles) was able to restore us to the Web within half an hour of my emailing him.
26 January
A very generous and discriminating friend gave me for Christmas Ronald Blythe’s 2022 book, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside. It was a pleasant shock to discover that Blythe was still alive, as the only other book of his I knew, Akenfield, was published in 1969. Then came the news that he died, aged 100, at his beloved Bottengoms Farm in Suffolk, on 14th of this month.
I started reading the book on Boxing Day and for peculiar reasons that I will attempt to analyse later, I finished it only yesterday, despite the fact that I had been reading it every day. As I immediately let my friend know, the book is a fantastic delight. It is an extremely skilful 456-page compilation, arranged by month but each month divided into subjects (‘Snowfall’…‘How to Paint Towers’…‘The Reverend Francis Kilvert’…‘On the Way to School’…‘Dwindling Landworkers’…‘To Console’…), from the weekly column ‘Word from Wormingford’ that Blythe wrote for the Church Times between 1993 and 2017.
Its style is all, and doubtless the man. The best description of it that I have seen is ‘a philosophical prose style as light as air’. A newspaper has described Blythe as ‘England’s greatest living country writer’ and the blurb calls him ‘one of the UK’s greatest living writers’ full stop. I could agree with both of those statements. Each section within a month is a fresh surprise, although there is a core of common themes — the church’s year (Blythe was a Reader at three country churches), his cats, the wildlife where he lives, village life and death, the farming year and ghostly past, John Constable, certain English poets and prose writers, hornets, and others. Here is a fairly typical short extract from page 128:
‘It was not always like this,’ I admonish the white cat: ‘tinned breakfast regularly at six, gorgeous radiators, blackbirds through the window, devoted old chap.’ Sometimes I hear them, the skinny labourers clumping down from the bothy to feed the stock, the girls singing in the dairy, the barefoot children falling over the dogs, the mother shouting, the pot bubbling. All gone into the dark, says the poet [T.S. Eliot]. Or into the light, says somebody else [Henry Vaughan].
It is all so fresh and unstrained, so effortless-looking, but actually the very pitch of linguistic skill and literary art. Nor, surely, can there be a more authentic portrait of country life in the very recent past, and presumably somewhere even now. I doubt whether Blythe chose or approved of the book’s title, which is rather obviously cashing in on the post-pandemic vogue for ‘Nature’ as mental therapy, but the book does produce a very strong feeling of an unstressed life ‘in harmony’ with something (perhaps ‘God’, rather than ‘Nature’), and Blythe isn’t ill in it once. I believe everyone should read the book and will enjoy it. It is beautifully produced, by the way, by Calderonia’s own Clays of Bungay, and Blythe’s is the first hardback of theirs with both bookmark and bellyband that I have seen since George Calderon: Edwardian Genius!
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
The Times, in a leader on 17 January sub-titled ‘Ronald Blythe’s bucolic writing appealed to a certain idea of England’, wrote that ‘For many, the real England is a Norman churchyard, a half-timbered pub and the tinkling of the doorbell in the village shop’. Blythe, the leader-writer claimed, ‘did more than most to promote this Elysian ideal of the countryside’, referring to his ‘ intimate study of village life from the 1880s to the 1960s’, Akenfield. This criticism is quite wrong, in my opinion. It was shot down next day by a reader who wrote that ‘In fact much of Blythe’s writing about provincial English life was thoroughly unsentimental and was marked by an acceptance of the need for change’ (evidence supplied). Blythe himself addresses the question in a section of this book entitled ‘Brutal Realities’ (p. 141): ‘The great quandary of those who write about the countryside, or who paint it, is how to keep the euphoric vision, if not out of the general picture entirely, in its proper place.’ In any case, the image that remains with one from Akenfield, I would have said, is of how unremittingly hard and un-euphoric life in the country was — hence Private Eye’s merciless parodying of the book as Akenballs.
The problem for me with Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside is rather different. I enjoyed the book so much when I started that I could hardly put it down. Around page 200, however, I began to feel funny, but couldn’t rationalise it. I decided to read at the rate of three or four sections at a time. That didn’t diminish my enjoyment; after all, it is written in entirely separate sections of a page or two, so it lends itself to a segmented reading. But gradually I came to think that the reason I was reading it slowly was that it was subtly but inexorably depressing me. If you look more closely, at least 65% of it is about the past. Events of long ago are constantly being re-evoked, Blythe sees ‘ghosts’ of the past in his mind’s eye, most of the writers he lovingly revisits are long dead, he officiates at many funerals, death and dead friends often feature. Moreover, time in the book is cyclical: the cycle of the seasons, of the Church of England’s services and saints, of an individual’s own life. The cumulative effect, for me at least, was a feeling of entrapment, of rising claustrophobia. In a strange way, then — strange because the writing is so good — I was relieved to finish the book and escape back into the fresh air of the present.
28 January
The death has been announced of the actor Sylvia Syms, at the age of 89. I am moved by what I read about her, because I previously did not know much about her film career (starting with Ice Cold in Alex, 1958, when she was twenty-four), everyone speaks so tenderly of her, and I can see that she was indeed beautiful as a young woman. I only knew her during the rehearsals and tour of Cambridge Theatre Company’s 1987 production of Last Summer in Chulimsk by Alexander Vampilov, for which I was the translator and Russian consultant. She would come and talk to me, but was so modest I never realised what a great star she had already been.
But I certainly realised that she was an exponent of real acting, with both enormous talent and sharp empathetic intelligence; which is why I prefer to use the generic word ‘actor’ of her. Her range was far greater than that of some of the grandes dames of our theatre today. In Chulimsk she played Anna Khoroshikh, the long-suffering manageress of a Soviet cafeteria in the depths of the Siberian taiga. Although literally never centre or front of stage, because the bar and kitchen were always upstage, the part of Anna has more truly tragic depth than any other, and Syms conveyed it with supreme restraint and power. She was completely ‘inside the head’ of this middle-aged woman who has an illegitimate son from being raped during the War and is still in love with her drunkard husband Dergachev, who was wounded, captured, sent to Siberia on his return, yet eventually married her. Without exaggeration, her acting of the part was so natural that she simply was this Russian woman. In this short scene she was unforgettable:
KHOROSHIKH (Sardonically): If you catch any sables, you will save one for me, won’t you? (Seriously) You will, won’t you?.. You used to give me things.
DERGACHEV: Used to, but those days are over. (Goes into back of cafeteria)
Khoroshikh wipes her eyes with her shawl.
Front left: Roy Marsden as Shamanov, centre: Sylvia Syms as Khoroshikh, back: Aidan Gillett as Pashka
Sylvia Syms as Khoroshikh at her ‘bar’ in Last Summer in Chulimsk, 1987
When the production came to Cambridge for a week, Sylvia very skilfully conveyed to me that she would like me to invite her into my college as a guest at high table. This was impossible, as I was not a Fellow of the college, only its Russian Lector. I always regret it, because she would have had the Fellows who remembered her in Ice Cold in Alex and Victim at her feet, and would undoubtedly have said something forthright to them (she was well to the Left) that would have been recounted over the port for years to come.
1 February
The words ‘Spring offensive’ are apt to strike fear. In March 1918 Ludendorff had stealthily brought up 750,000 new troops and three quarters of his entire artillery to concentrate on what he judged to be the weakest point of the British line; the Germans broke through, and within a week had advanced forty miles on a fifty mile front. Putin plans to draft 300,000 new conscripts into occupied Ukraine by the end of February and mount a similar attempt, some say at a weak point like Bakhmut, others say he has instructed his generals to throw this numerically superior force all along the eastern front and make a general advance.
I recently met a British career diplomat who specialises in War. He told me that at the moment, the ‘war of attrition’ on the Ukrainian eastern front is ‘just like the First World War, the only new element is the attacking drones’. I said I thought we had to be ready for the Russians to make considerable advances during their spring offensive, as we had not given the Ukrainians state-of-the-art tanks and other systems soon enough. Therefore, I added, it will all come down to the Ukrainian counter-offensive: would the West make sure the Ukrainians had the weapons to win that, and go on to drive the Russians out completely? As diplomats are skilled in doing, he simply did not react to that.
Are we, in fact, giving the Ukrainians just enough to prevent them from being defeated this year, but not enough to enable them to win? If we gave them all the materiel they need NOW, we would save thousands and thousands of Ukrainian — and Russian — lives, because the war would be shortened. On the other hand, after the Germans broke through in March 1918, the allies, especially Foch and Haig, learnt fast from their mistakes, evolved a different strategy, counter attacked, broke through the Siegfried Line, and by November had won. The Ukrainians, with their superior morale and creative imagination, are quite capable of doing the same even if the Russians break through in places.
3 February
From left to right: the Speckled Wood, Ringlet and Marbled White, of the Family Satyridae. The first two have colonised Cambridge gardens since 2000, the Marbled White was sighted in one last year.
I have received communications from Cambridge City Council officers that they have commissioned wildlife ‘surveys’ this year of the 0.4 hectare Tree Belt that the Council owns behind our houses. The history is that for thirty years this wildlife haven and corridor was kept closed to the public, the Council treated it as ‘a kind of nature reserve’ (their words), but they recently transferred it with no public consultation from Property Services to Open Spaces, thereby surreptitiously changing its use. Since then, it has been invaded by ‘educational’ groups who took in dogs, lit fires, trampled on undergrowth, picked wild flowers, screamed and rang bells. A majority (63%) of local residents adjoining the Tree Belt are against the change of use and have been fighting it tooth and nail for the past year.
To give you an idea of the Council’s competence, it had promised residents a Management Plan before any group was allowed in, but forgot about it (and facts such as fires being banned on Council property). The Council ought also to have commissioned a ‘baseline study’ of the haven’s wildlife before permitting public use, but they did not. A councillor assured me that access would be restricted during the birds’ nesting season (February-June/August), but it has not been. Since the Tree Belt has been unmolested for thirty years, a surprising range of birds has been observed (from gardens) to nest in there, from Tawny Owls and Spotted Flycatchers to Blackcaps and Sparrowhawks. Armed with the opinions of the RSPB and British Trust for Ornithology, I sought to persuade Council officers that the only ‘baseline study’ of nesting that would be fit for purpose would be one of the status quo ante, i.e. of the TB closed to public access for the duration of the study. Alas, no, they have dropped the idea of a ‘baseline study’ and gone for ‘surveys’ carried out this year whilst up to 80 people a week are traipsing in and out. An ornithologist friend who was once Head of Science at English Nature, describes this as ‘ridiculous’.
The particular reason I’ve got involved is that, although I have entered the Tree Belt only twice in thirty years (1991 with the Council’s Conservation Officer and 2022 with the Biodiversity Officer), my family seem to have been the only locals who have kept lists of wildlife observed in their gardens abutting the Tree Belt, and these records are now useful. They suggest a decline in biodiversity of 20-25% since 1991. The reasons could include a big increase in human activity; noise pollution and traffic (the only Tawny Owls I have actually seen in the neighbourhood recently were squashed flat on roads); species epidemics; global warming. The weird thing is, though, that some species are more common than ever (e.g. Goldfinches) and some entirely new species have appeared, for instance the Speckled Wood butterfly, Ringlet, and (last year) the Marbled White. Of course, I greatly regret the loss of Greenfinches and Small Tortoiseshell butterflies due to epidemics, or the disappearance from our garden (despite wilding) of the Wall butterfly, Large Skipper and Essex Skipper. The vitality of the new Satyridae species, however, is astounding. Evidently there are ‘winners and losers’… But the cause is fundamentally the same: human impact on ecosystems, whether global or a mere 0.4 hectares.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
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‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George Calderon, 1912
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
George Calderon c.1901
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Captain of the 11
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
From the diary of a writer-publisher: 21
Katherine Mansfield
7 January
Almost themed, one could say, in Calderonia, Cambridge academic Ruth Scurr has written a meaty review in today’s Spectator of Claire Harman’s experiment in biography All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything. Anyone who writes short stories should know Mansfield’s work intimately. But I am not sure that I agree with this Scurr/Harman statement: ‘In our age of pandemics, loneliness and an overwhelming number of texts online, Harman suggests, appreciation of short stories — which ask “the biggest questions in the smallest spaces” — is burgeoning.’ I can’t say I have noticed such a burgeoning. The problem, surely, is that word ‘overwhelming’. I have posted a few of my old ‘piffle’ stories on Calderonia, and admit it’s a terribly convenient way of putting short stories ‘out there’. But given the ‘overwhelming’ nature of the Web, can many, if any, short stories get noticed? Are that many writers bothering, then? The days when many more writers than Chekhov could publish a story a week in a newspaper, or Mansfield regularly publish in literary magazines, and get paid a living wage for it, are gone forever.
My publishing project this year is a book of twenty of my short stories, old and new, 60% of which are written. Maybe Harman’s words have encouraged me to preview some new ones online fresh from the oven… It needs thinking about.
14 January
Paranoia apart, it’s my considered view that Calderonia was shut down yesterday by a Russian hacker. The Russian end of Sam&Sam had committed himself to a much longer and franker thread than usual — which I diminuendoed back to silence as fast as I could. Shortly afterwards, a view from Russia popped up on ‘Statistics’, despite the fact that the people I know in Russia can’t access Calderonia. By the evening, Calderonia was ‘unavailable’ worldwide, although of course I did not notice this immediately. My guess is that someone in Russia was researching (not for the first time?) who I am, and discovered my take on Ukraine. Ostensibly, the problem was that the server security certificates of some strands of patrickmileswriter.co.uk had expired. We have never had this problem in nine years, however. Why it should have happened now and triggered unavailability was not really clear. My own theory is that disabling or ‘enforcing’ some of these security certificates was the only way a hacker could shoot us down, given that WordPress’s cyber defences seem state of the art. Fortunately, Calderonia’s own IT expert (aka Jim Miles) was able to restore us to the Web within half an hour of my emailing him.
26 January
A very generous and discriminating friend gave me for Christmas Ronald Blythe’s 2022 book, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside. It was a pleasant shock to discover that Blythe was still alive, as the only other book of his I knew, Akenfield, was published in 1969. Then came the news that he died, aged 100, at his beloved Bottengoms Farm in Suffolk, on 14th of this month.
I started reading the book on Boxing Day and for peculiar reasons that I will attempt to analyse later, I finished it only yesterday, despite the fact that I had been reading it every day. As I immediately let my friend know, the book is a fantastic delight. It is an extremely skilful 456-page compilation, arranged by month but each month divided into subjects (‘Snowfall’…‘How to Paint Towers’…‘The Reverend Francis Kilvert’…‘On the Way to School’…‘Dwindling Landworkers’…‘To Console’…), from the weekly column ‘Word from Wormingford’ that Blythe wrote for the Church Times between 1993 and 2017.
Its style is all, and doubtless the man. The best description of it that I have seen is ‘a philosophical prose style as light as air’. A newspaper has described Blythe as ‘England’s greatest living country writer’ and the blurb calls him ‘one of the UK’s greatest living writers’ full stop. I could agree with both of those statements. Each section within a month is a fresh surprise, although there is a core of common themes — the church’s year (Blythe was a Reader at three country churches), his cats, the wildlife where he lives, village life and death, the farming year and ghostly past, John Constable, certain English poets and prose writers, hornets, and others. Here is a fairly typical short extract from page 128:
It is all so fresh and unstrained, so effortless-looking, but actually the very pitch of linguistic skill and literary art. Nor, surely, can there be a more authentic portrait of country life in the very recent past, and presumably somewhere even now. I doubt whether Blythe chose or approved of the book’s title, which is rather obviously cashing in on the post-pandemic vogue for ‘Nature’ as mental therapy, but the book does produce a very strong feeling of an unstressed life ‘in harmony’ with something (perhaps ‘God’, rather than ‘Nature’), and Blythe isn’t ill in it once. I believe everyone should read the book and will enjoy it. It is beautifully produced, by the way, by Calderonia’s own Clays of Bungay, and Blythe’s is the first hardback of theirs with both bookmark and bellyband that I have seen since George Calderon: Edwardian Genius!
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
The Times, in a leader on 17 January sub-titled ‘Ronald Blythe’s bucolic writing appealed to a certain idea of England’, wrote that ‘For many, the real England is a Norman churchyard, a half-timbered pub and the tinkling of the doorbell in the village shop’. Blythe, the leader-writer claimed, ‘did more than most to promote this Elysian ideal of the countryside’, referring to his ‘ intimate study of village life from the 1880s to the 1960s’, Akenfield. This criticism is quite wrong, in my opinion. It was shot down next day by a reader who wrote that ‘In fact much of Blythe’s writing about provincial English life was thoroughly unsentimental and was marked by an acceptance of the need for change’ (evidence supplied). Blythe himself addresses the question in a section of this book entitled ‘Brutal Realities’ (p. 141): ‘The great quandary of those who write about the countryside, or who paint it, is how to keep the euphoric vision, if not out of the general picture entirely, in its proper place.’ In any case, the image that remains with one from Akenfield, I would have said, is of how unremittingly hard and un-euphoric life in the country was — hence Private Eye’s merciless parodying of the book as Akenballs.
The problem for me with Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside is rather different. I enjoyed the book so much when I started that I could hardly put it down. Around page 200, however, I began to feel funny, but couldn’t rationalise it. I decided to read at the rate of three or four sections at a time. That didn’t diminish my enjoyment; after all, it is written in entirely separate sections of a page or two, so it lends itself to a segmented reading. But gradually I came to think that the reason I was reading it slowly was that it was subtly but inexorably depressing me. If you look more closely, at least 65% of it is about the past. Events of long ago are constantly being re-evoked, Blythe sees ‘ghosts’ of the past in his mind’s eye, most of the writers he lovingly revisits are long dead, he officiates at many funerals, death and dead friends often feature. Moreover, time in the book is cyclical: the cycle of the seasons, of the Church of England’s services and saints, of an individual’s own life. The cumulative effect, for me at least, was a feeling of entrapment, of rising claustrophobia. In a strange way, then — strange because the writing is so good — I was relieved to finish the book and escape back into the fresh air of the present.
28 January
The death has been announced of the actor Sylvia Syms, at the age of 89. I am moved by what I read about her, because I previously did not know much about her film career (starting with Ice Cold in Alex, 1958, when she was twenty-four), everyone speaks so tenderly of her, and I can see that she was indeed beautiful as a young woman. I only knew her during the rehearsals and tour of Cambridge Theatre Company’s 1987 production of Last Summer in Chulimsk by Alexander Vampilov, for which I was the translator and Russian consultant. She would come and talk to me, but was so modest I never realised what a great star she had already been.
But I certainly realised that she was an exponent of real acting, with both enormous talent and sharp empathetic intelligence; which is why I prefer to use the generic word ‘actor’ of her. Her range was far greater than that of some of the grandes dames of our theatre today. In Chulimsk she played Anna Khoroshikh, the long-suffering manageress of a Soviet cafeteria in the depths of the Siberian taiga. Although literally never centre or front of stage, because the bar and kitchen were always upstage, the part of Anna has more truly tragic depth than any other, and Syms conveyed it with supreme restraint and power. She was completely ‘inside the head’ of this middle-aged woman who has an illegitimate son from being raped during the War and is still in love with her drunkard husband Dergachev, who was wounded, captured, sent to Siberia on his return, yet eventually married her. Without exaggeration, her acting of the part was so natural that she simply was this Russian woman. In this short scene she was unforgettable:
KHOROSHIKH (Sardonically): If you catch any sables, you will save one for me, won’t you? (Seriously) You will, won’t you?.. You used to give me things.
DERGACHEV: Used to, but those days are over. (Goes into back of cafeteria)
Khoroshikh wipes her eyes with her shawl.
Front left: Roy Marsden as Shamanov, centre: Sylvia Syms as Khoroshikh, back: Aidan Gillett as Pashka
Sylvia Syms as Khoroshikh at her ‘bar’ in Last Summer in Chulimsk, 1987
When the production came to Cambridge for a week, Sylvia very skilfully conveyed to me that she would like me to invite her into my college as a guest at high table. This was impossible, as I was not a Fellow of the college, only its Russian Lector. I always regret it, because she would have had the Fellows who remembered her in Ice Cold in Alex and Victim at her feet, and would undoubtedly have said something forthright to them (she was well to the Left) that would have been recounted over the port for years to come.
1 February
The words ‘Spring offensive’ are apt to strike fear. In March 1918 Ludendorff had stealthily brought up 750,000 new troops and three quarters of his entire artillery to concentrate on what he judged to be the weakest point of the British line; the Germans broke through, and within a week had advanced forty miles on a fifty mile front. Putin plans to draft 300,000 new conscripts into occupied Ukraine by the end of February and mount a similar attempt, some say at a weak point like Bakhmut, others say he has instructed his generals to throw this numerically superior force all along the eastern front and make a general advance.
I recently met a British career diplomat who specialises in War. He told me that at the moment, the ‘war of attrition’ on the Ukrainian eastern front is ‘just like the First World War, the only new element is the attacking drones’. I said I thought we had to be ready for the Russians to make considerable advances during their spring offensive, as we had not given the Ukrainians state-of-the-art tanks and other systems soon enough. Therefore, I added, it will all come down to the Ukrainian counter-offensive: would the West make sure the Ukrainians had the weapons to win that, and go on to drive the Russians out completely? As diplomats are skilled in doing, he simply did not react to that.
Are we, in fact, giving the Ukrainians just enough to prevent them from being defeated this year, but not enough to enable them to win? If we gave them all the materiel they need NOW, we would save thousands and thousands of Ukrainian — and Russian — lives, because the war would be shortened. On the other hand, after the Germans broke through in March 1918, the allies, especially Foch and Haig, learnt fast from their mistakes, evolved a different strategy, counter attacked, broke through the Siegfried Line, and by November had won. The Ukrainians, with their superior morale and creative imagination, are quite capable of doing the same even if the Russians break through in places.
3 February
From left to right: the Speckled Wood, Ringlet and Marbled White, of the Family Satyridae. The first two have colonised Cambridge gardens since 2000, the Marbled White was sighted in one last year.
I have received communications from Cambridge City Council officers that they have commissioned wildlife ‘surveys’ this year of the 0.4 hectare Tree Belt that the Council owns behind our houses. The history is that for thirty years this wildlife haven and corridor was kept closed to the public, the Council treated it as ‘a kind of nature reserve’ (their words), but they recently transferred it with no public consultation from Property Services to Open Spaces, thereby surreptitiously changing its use. Since then, it has been invaded by ‘educational’ groups who took in dogs, lit fires, trampled on undergrowth, picked wild flowers, screamed and rang bells. A majority (63%) of local residents adjoining the Tree Belt are against the change of use and have been fighting it tooth and nail for the past year.
To give you an idea of the Council’s competence, it had promised residents a Management Plan before any group was allowed in, but forgot about it (and facts such as fires being banned on Council property). The Council ought also to have commissioned a ‘baseline study’ of the haven’s wildlife before permitting public use, but they did not. A councillor assured me that access would be restricted during the birds’ nesting season (February-June/August), but it has not been. Since the Tree Belt has been unmolested for thirty years, a surprising range of birds has been observed (from gardens) to nest in there, from Tawny Owls and Spotted Flycatchers to Blackcaps and Sparrowhawks. Armed with the opinions of the RSPB and British Trust for Ornithology, I sought to persuade Council officers that the only ‘baseline study’ of nesting that would be fit for purpose would be one of the status quo ante, i.e. of the TB closed to public access for the duration of the study. Alas, no, they have dropped the idea of a ‘baseline study’ and gone for ‘surveys’ carried out this year whilst up to 80 people a week are traipsing in and out. An ornithologist friend who was once Head of Science at English Nature, describes this as ‘ridiculous’.
The particular reason I’ve got involved is that, although I have entered the Tree Belt only twice in thirty years (1991 with the Council’s Conservation Officer and 2022 with the Biodiversity Officer), my family seem to have been the only locals who have kept lists of wildlife observed in their gardens abutting the Tree Belt, and these records are now useful. They suggest a decline in biodiversity of 20-25% since 1991. The reasons could include a big increase in human activity; noise pollution and traffic (the only Tawny Owls I have actually seen in the neighbourhood recently were squashed flat on roads); species epidemics; global warming. The weird thing is, though, that some species are more common than ever (e.g. Goldfinches) and some entirely new species have appeared, for instance the Speckled Wood butterfly, Ringlet, and (last year) the Marbled White. Of course, I greatly regret the loss of Greenfinches and Small Tortoiseshell butterflies due to epidemics, or the disappearance from our garden (despite wilding) of the Wall butterfly, Large Skipper and Essex Skipper. The vitality of the new Satyridae species, however, is astounding. Evidently there are ‘winners and losers’… But the cause is fundamentally the same: human impact on ecosystems, whether global or a mere 0.4 hectares.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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