A quiet place.
To an enemy, our hands are the most immediate threat. With our hands thrust as far away from our body as possible, most of us are defenceless, except for those with awesome kicking skills. Here, two soldiers play at war as if they were boys, except the gun and bayonet are real. And the war is real. But so are the smiles, for now.
13th May – Wandered down an alley beside an antique shop, attracted by old French doors lined up against the wall. I wonder who would buy them, they’re so tall and our doorways are not. The wrought iron is so rusty. The paint so unattached. Yet I ache for the doorways they came from.
14th May – Read that echidnas are carnivores because they eat ants. So, an ant is meat!
15th May – Tutored a student who never gave more than one-word answers.
16th May – Saw a large older woman waiting for a bus wearing a knee-length purple cardigan and fluffy pink earmuffs.
17th May – Read that Abraham’s wife Sarah is the only woman in the Bible to have her age at death recorded. She was 127.
3rd May – A student sent me an email that seemed blank until a few words caught my eye on the far right of the screen. Her computer was set for Arabic.
4th May – The restrooms in a trendy shopping village have blue lighting which makes your skin look blue. Found out today this makes finding a vein impossible.
5th May – When a police car arrived outside the Housing flats opposite us, an old guy doing some gardening stood up with both hands in the air. I was relieved to see them all laugh.
6th May – Tonight there was a Super Moon: the orbiting moon came the closest it gets to the earth. My husband and I took photos – I shot the moon and he shot the possum. With a camera.
7th May – Had my hair cut by a hairdresser who said ‘beautiful’ every time I spoke. I liked it. At first.
This photo has a smudged look which resembles my own unspectacled vision of lights. Unable to focus, I can’t tell where a light begins and ends.
The photo comes from my father’s war album and has the caption “King Pharouk celebration”, though the name is more commonly spelt Farouk. At 16 years of age in 1936, he was crowned King of Egypt, its penultimate king. I’ve searched through Google images for photo clues and found one showing him at a celebration of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday, standing near a huge crown with draping lights, as they are in my photo here. The date would be in the early 1940s.
Though Egypt was neutral for most of World War II, allied troops including Australians were posted there and Egypt thus became a potential target for German and Italian bombing, so cities were blacked out at night. But the extravagant King Farouk who lived a lavish life refused to turn off the lights in his palace in Alexandria. His fellow Alexandrians were not happy.
The photo I chose for the ‘Together’ challenge shows soldiers far from home, undoubtedly lonely for family and not wanting to isolate themselves from the local people.
It reminded me of the concluding words of George Sand (pen name of Mme Aurore Dudevant) after spending a couple of months in a deserted monastery in Majorca, separated from almost everyone except her family and her lover, Frédéric Chopin. Two paragraphs express her need, not for solitude, but for companionship:
“In the stormy days of youth, we imagine that solitude is the great refuge against attacks, the great remedy for battle wounds. This is a grave error. Life experience teaches us that when we cannot live in peace with our fellow man, no poetic admiration or pleasures of art are capable of filling the abyss that forms in the depth of our soul.
I had always dreamt of living in the desert, and any simple dreamer will admit he has had the same fantasy. But believe me, my brothers, we have hearts too loving to get by without each other; and the best thing left for us to do is tolerate each other, for we are like children of the same womb who tease, fight and even hit each other, and yet cannot part.”
George Sand, A Winter in Majorca, 1855 (My translation)
I found this photo of the early morning sun over the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, probably Port Said which faces east. It was taken during the war, in 1941 or 1942.
I selected it because of the sunrays bursting out below darkish clouds. I love the silhouette of the lamppost and the large tent, but what I love even more is what appears on an image like this, one that I’ve looked at for the past fifty years as a Kodak 4″ x 3″ photo in an album, when I brighten it with an image editor and all the detail of the tents, the lamppost, the fence and the man in white becomes evident. The scene was captured by a Brownie box camera, but no one back in Australia knew what was below that morning sky, until now. It’s an exquisite pleasure to draw details from a black and white photo which have hidden there all these years. See a photo I submitted during the February photo challenge, where some words I had ignored, because barely visible on a tiny photo, became plain as day with a bit of image tweaking.
Here’s the photo for the Sun challenge, as it looks in the album:
And below is the photo with adjusted curves. For me, someone with bad night vision, this is what I imagine it’s like to see in the dark.
8th April – My son is on a camping holiday for four nights at the Folk Festival, fifteen minutes from home.
9th April – The 100th day of this year. A guest brought us some Hot Cross Buns from a Vegan bakery. On the packet it says ‘cruelty free’. How much cruelty is there in producing a sweet bun in a traditional bakery? (Each of the six buns was wrapped in cling wrap.)
10th April – A hairdresser washed my hair, then massaged my head for minutes and minutes and minutes. She seemed to be luxuriously filling in spare time.
11th April – In a book of short stories I found that the Q is the Queen of Capital Letters with an attention-seeking train.
12th April – Survey results today show the greatest editorial barrier to publishing literary translations is the ‘cost of paying translators’. I’ll push on with my novel translation anyway, for the love of it.
13th April – Went to my son’s wedding rehearsal in the forest. The bride’s father was mowing a path, an aisle, for her to enter along.
14th April – The wedding day; the most unusual wedding I’ve ever been to. The bride played a ukulele (which she has just learnt) and sang, in the sweetest voice I’ve heard, a song by Ingrid Michaelson, You and I. (Note the chair – refer to my ‘unusual thing’ for 5th Feb; note the table – she found it at a flea market and painted it this week; note the bunting – she made it.)
15th April – At dinner with my son and his bride, she was still wearing her wedding shoes which she bought online from Sweden. (See photo above)
16th April – Years ago I opened a long-term investment account at the bank with $500, and tried to do it again today. The minimum they now take is $5,000.
17th April – Watched a documentary about an Australian man who gave up a wealthy Hollywood life to establish schools for kids from the rubbish dumps of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. He started the Cambodian Children’s Fund: http://www.cambodianchildrensfund.org/
The subject of this photo is clearly the architecture. But then, I can’t stop looking at its left edge. The photo is one of many in my father’s World War II album, from the months when he was in the Middle East, mostly Egypt. He entitled it “Temple”, though I’m pretty sure the photo was taken in a mosque.
I have a carpet on my floor closely resembling those on the “temple” floor, which makes me feel the 70 years which have passed since the war are nothing in the history of Oriental carpet designs, and nothing in the history of geometrical forms covered in stylised vines and wreaths, all of it hinting at the perfection of God. The written messages fascinate me, all the more because I can’t read them.
The photo I submitted for this week’s photo challenge, Journey, reminded me of a poem in my father’s poetry book about the hats in the photo: The Old Slouch Hat. The name of the hat reflects the way it is worn ‘slouching’ on one side while the other side is often pinned against the crown to allow a rifle to be slung over the shoulder. It was worn by Australian soldiers in the Boer War and World War I, then again in World War II, and every war since.
The handwriting is my father’s but the words are by a ‘soldier in Tobruk’, Libya. My transcription follows these images.
The old slouch hat,
It’s not exactly glamorous,
The old slouch hat,
It’s not exactly chic.
But there’s something more than beauty,
A glorious tradition,
In the old slouch hat
That will ever to it stick.
*****
The old slouch hat,
It’s not exactly elegant,
The old slouch hat,
It might be rather plain.
But it showed the world the stuff
That Aus. sons were made of,
Did the old slouch hat,
And it’s doing it again.
When I chose this photo of soldiers on-board a ship on its way to or from the Middle East in 1941 or 1942, I noticed, for the first time, the hat shadow. And then I thought about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and The Little Prince. Perhaps Saint-Exupéry had seen soldiers’ hats when he was in North Africa in the 1930s. If the on-board photo is flipped horizontally, the shadow looks just like the Little Prince’s “drawing Number One”:
If you’ve never read his story, you won’t know that the Little Prince showed the grown-ups his masterpiece and asked them if his drawing scared them. “Why be scared of a hat?” they asked. But he tells us, “My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.”
But back to the photo challenge: these soldiers are going on (or have been on) a journey that most of them will regret. Yet they look pretty relaxed here. Actually, pretty hot. They were probably travelling close to the equator. My father wrote some poetic lines about the boredom and wretchedness of being on-board a troop ship for weeks at a time. When you’re 20 years old and volunteer to go abroad to defend your country, it probably feels adventurous. And then you sail off, no turning back.