This Week in Britishness

As an unrepentant tea drinker I of course lean toward the Anglophilic, but even I have to concede that these two pieces take Britishness to extremes.

The first was an excerpt of a memoir called Coming Up Trumps that I have to admit sounds wonderful, written by the 90-year-old Baronness Trumpington, nee Jean Campbell-Harris, who seems to have been brought up in luxury and been willing to do pretty much anything to anyone at any time. The photo here is the time "when my good friend Tom King – Lord King of Bridgwater – commented that those people who had served in the Second World War were starting to look ‘pretty old’, it was a natural reaction to stick two fingers up at him." As one does when in the House of Lords.

In the snippet in the Daily Mail, the Baronness writes (among other things) of her time at Bletchley Park.

Although essential, the work formed a dull and exhausting routine. Whenever we could, we rushed up to London and danced all night, then ate enormous breakfasts at a Lyons Corner House, with fake scrambled eggs, fake everything. We always went to the 400, a nightclub on Leicester Square that doesn’t exist any more. We had such happy parties there. I was horrified once because I was at one table with a boyfriend and I looked round and saw my brother at another table with a girlfriend. That was bad enough. But then I looked round again and there, at a third table, was my father. With a girlfriend.

I will have to get my hand on this memoir when it comes out.

And the second moment of Extreme Britishness...well, this is where I have to admit that I regularly and very happily listen to The Deadline, the weekly obits podcast produced by the Daily Telegraph. And there is this very odd section in the middle about letters written to the Telegraph that almost makes me wonder if it's a parody of Britishness.

Take this week, for instance, in which there is a segment about letters on "the proper way to fold fitted sheets" that somehow leads us to King Alfred bowling the cakes, George II's son Fred "who was killed by a cricket ball," and Rule Britannia...I'm still not sure how that worked. You'll just have to listen to it yourself. And say no to the tyranny of hospital corners.

Now, mustache news...

Various & Sundry: Not About General Convention Edition

I'm sitting in the Denver airport, en route between General Convention in Indianapolis and the World Domination Summit in Portland, and thought I would write a quick post that includes ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the Episcopal Church. It's going to be quick, though.  Ready? Here you go:

Let's start with the obits, and baseball great Doris Sams. "Doris Sams, who pitched a perfect game and set a single-season home run record in the women’s professional baseball world of the 1940s and 50s that inspired the movie “A League of Their Own,” died Thursday in Knoxville, Tenn." A phenom. I also love this story:

She once outdueled Lois Florreich of the Rockford Peaches through 22 innings, winning by 1-0, as she remembered it, in a game that had been tied after the scheduled seven innings as the short game of a doubleheader.

“After that, I told my manager: ‘I don’t want to pitch any more seven-inning games. They’re too long,’” Sue Macy quoted Sams saying in her league history “A Whole New Ball Game” (1993).

In World War II obituary news, you must read this great account of derring-do by the wonderfully titled Count Robert de la Rochefoucauld. He escaped execution twice, once by faking an epileptic fit

and, when the guard opened the door to his cell, hit him over the head with a table leg before breaking his neck. (“Thank Goodness for that pitilessly efficient training,” he noted). After putting on the German’s uniform, La Rochefoucauld walked into the guardroom and shot the two other German jailers. He then simply walked out of the fort, through the deserted town, and to the address of an underground contact.

The escape further entailed dressing as a nun.

You might be surprised to learn of these 5 forms of charity that are not helping. This article helpfully summarizes what you think you are doing, and why you shouldn't do it.

I thought this article on who gives or accepts compliments was fascinating. (Hint: women are bad at it in a strange variety of ways.) Note to self: say thank you and move on.

Looking for that perfect gift for your 16th wedding anniversary? The Bloggess suggests you say it with sloths.

No slothiness allowed here. Got to run!

This week in death

So many good obits this week! So many interesting people doing such diverse things that I can't find a theme among them.  I mean, we have a madam, an "elephant whisperer", a war hero,  the guy who designed C3PO, a botanical artist, and a songwriter.  It's...supercalifragilisticexpialidobits!

But you want to know about the madam, don't you?  I know you do.  That would be Edna Milton Chadwell, the final madam of the actual Chicken Ranch of Best Little Whorehouse in Texas fame. Doesn't she look like a society matron? After the brothel was shut down, she married and moved to Phoenix.  I wonder what she did there. According to the Telegraph, "Her nephew, Robert Kleffman, described her as 'hard-nosed, but with a spine of steel and a heart of gold'."

The Elephant Whisperer is Lawrence Anthony, a South African conservationist who, among other things, slipped across the Kuwait-Iraq border to rescue the animals of the Baghdad zoo.  Amazing story in its own right.  Then there's the elephants...

In 1999 he was telephoned by a conservation organisation which asked whether he would be willing to take on a herd of nine animals which had escaped from every enclosure they had ever been in, wreaking havoc across KwaZulu-Natal, and were considered highly dangerous. Realising that the elephants would be shot if he declined, Anthony agreed to give them a home. 

“They were a difficult bunch, no question about it,” he recalled. “Delinquents every one. But I could see a lot of good in them too. They’d had a tough time and were all scared, and yet they were looking after one another, trying to protect one another.” 

Anthony decided to treat the elephants as errant children, working to persuade them, through words and gestures, that they should not behave badly and that they could trust him. He concentrated his attention on Nana, the matriarch of the herd: “I’d go down to the fence and I’d plead with Nana not to break it down,” he said. “I knew she didn’t understand English, but I hoped she’d understand by the tone of my voice and my body language what I was saying. And one morning, instead of trying to break the fence down, she just stood there. Then she put her trunk through the fence towards me. I knew she wanted to touch me. That was a turning point.” Soon they were allowed out into the reserve.

I love that story.

Then there's Van Barfoot, who won a Medal of Honor for taking out a whole passel of Nazis in WWII, and then had to fight his neighborhood association so he could raise a flag in his front yard.  Damn neighborhood associations! There should be a medal for taking them on.

It's probably due to Ralph McQuarrie that we have any of the Star Wars films at all.  It was because of his artwork that the film studios could picture what the movie might look like and helped persuade them to greenlight the project.  You can see some of that original artwork on his website, including this conception of C3PO and R2D2.

In a very different world of art, the story of how Mary Grierson became a botanical artist at Kew Gardens is worth noting. "In 1960, while applying for a post organising exhibitions at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, she proffered a portfolio of her paintings of wild flowers (executed as a hobby in her spare time) to her interviewer, Edgar Milne-Redhead, Keeper of the Kew Herbarium. He took one look at them and told her she would be much better employed as the Herbarium’s resident artist."  Which says something about not minimizing your gifts, I would say.  Gor. Jus.

Finally, Robert Sherman, who with his brother Richard wrote so many wonderful songs for Walt Disney and won an Academy Award for the score to Mary Poppins, died on Monday.  All week, I've been thinking to myself, "If you say it loud enough you'll always sound precocious" was such a fabulous line!  Really, "atrocious" and "precocious" in a children's song? We need more of that.  But here's my favorite song from Mary Poppins.

On the end of DADT

For me, Don't Ask, Don't Tell is a reminder that sometimes a compromise is compromising.

I wasn't paying much attention at the time, but as I remember it when this deal was struck during the Clinton administration, it was considered a step forward from an outright ban on gays in military service.

In retrospect, from my perspective, DADT proved itself to be oppressive, with gay servicemembers bearing the burden. Was anyone kicked out of the military for not asking? Because surely a lot of people were kicked out even when they didn't tell.

I wonder if one of the things to be learned from this is that a compromise is unacceptable when the burden of the compromise is unevenly shared. And I hope we can begin to see that "I think it's icky" (or "wrong" or "sinful") is a very different burden from "I will not be allowed to serve. I will lose my livelihood. My loved ones will not get the support your loved ones get."

And perhaps once and for all we can get past the tired "troop morale" trope that got trotted out for African Americans and women. It's time for that old saw to retire.

This morning on Twitter, Obit Mag said RIP DADT, with a link to a 2008 article about gay WWII vets. I thought about their stories as I listened to the President's speech this morning.



RIP, DADT. I understand why you were born. But you still lived too long.

Vernon Baker

Beautiful and moving obituary today for Vernon Baker, "the only living black veteran awarded the Medal of Honor for valor in World War II, receiving it 52 years after he wiped out four German machine-gun nests on a hilltop in northern Italy."

As Mr. Clinton placed the Medal of Honor around his neck, Mr. Baker stared into space, a tear rolling down his left cheek. “I was thinking about what was going on up on the hill that day,” he said later.

I think this says it all.

Memorial Day--the National Cemetery System

Yesterday, I was overcome with a desire to pay my respects to those who have served in the Armed Forces in some sort of active way. I don't know how I came to learn of it, but I knew that there is a National Cemetery system, that Arlington isn't the only one. And so I decided to go and visit and see what I could see.

The National Cemetery nearest me is the Sacramento Valley National Cemetery--a very recent one, formally dedicated in 2007. It's about halfway between the Bay Area and Sacramento, a rather hot, flat area just off of highway 80 and across from a fruit orchard. And in the middle of seemingly nowhere, here's this National Cemetery.

The way they set up the entrance has basically a marble wall with gaps for cars to drive in. It felt like I was literally driving into a memorial, which I suppose I was.

I'm so glad I went. It was incredibly moving to me. I didn't take a lot of pictures because it felt disrespectful somehow. But I walked through and tried to take in some notion of each person I visited.

Each headstone or columbarium niche was marked with the person's name, what branch of the service they were in, what rank they held, what war (or wars) they were part of, years of birth and death, and then (often) a personal statement.

There was a small flag in front of every grave, as you can see here:

At least I hope you can see it.

Because the cemetery is so new, the columbaria are sparsely attended, so to speak. Only the facades with remains had the flags in front of them. Although there was also lots of empty lawn that will soon also have headstones, there was more of an impact in seeing all those empty niches that will eventually be filled.

What also hit me were seeing all of these stories that I didn't know in one place. The fact that veterans are not grouped by war meant that I saw "Vietnam" and then "World War II" and then "Korea" and then "Persian Gulf" all cheek by jowl. So many stories.

One thing I didn't know was that the spouse could also be recognized and buried in the National Cemetery. I don't know the rules on that. Some seemed to have their own plot; others (and I found this fascinating) were marked on the back of the headstone of the service member. I loved the one where the personal statement was "Hello It's Just Grandma." Says a story right there, doesn't it?

Although I knew it, it hadn't really sunk in that at the National Cemeteries you don't choose a plot; you are buried by date: the most recent next to the next recent, and so on. Maybe this will explain:

Date of interment for the far right was May 27; two to the left of that on May 26; etc. It made me think how inexorable death is, whether you die fighting or end up spending a long life after the war is over. Death goes marching on, tromping over the lawn, and we remember as best we can.

If you are looking for something meaningful to do this Memorial Day, I would recommend that you look up the National Cemetery closest to you and pay a visit. It gave me, at any rate, a sense of the broader picture of what we're talking about when we talk about Memorial Day. Maybe you will find it meaningful too.

Teaser Tuesday, May 11

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

* Grab your current read
* Open to a random page
* Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
* Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This week's teaser is from my WWII reading series (now that I'm on my second book, I guess it's officially a "series"): The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington. What a combination! We've got WWII, YA literature and espionage in one 350-page package!

Here's the teaser:

Never one to follow the rules, be it at school or at the embassy, Dahl was always getting up to some kind of mischief, whether it was filching expensive cigars from his boss's office and passing them around, or sending self-aggrandizing missives to Marsh written on the thick, buff-colored British Embassy stationery and carrying the official red wax seal. His favorite pastime was lampooning the mannered style of his country's wartime representatives, particularly that of the British ambassador, the first Earl of Halifax, an old Etonian who even his erudite information officer, Isaiah Berlin, an Oxford philosopher, described as "being not of this century."

He sounds like one of his cheeky characters, doesn't he?

***

Previously on Teaser Tuesday: I finished and greatly enjoyed David Carkeet's From Away. I reviewed it and other Carkeet books here.

Canon John Vaughan-Jones

This obit, of a C of E cleric who served as a Padre in the Parachute Regiment in WWII, delights me for the names of the places where he served during his long life. 

Starting with his grandfather who was rector of Dagenham (his father was also a priest), Canon John Paschal Vaughan-Jones (born on Easter, don't you know), served in Laindon cum Basildon, St. Martin's, Chipping Ongar (later becoming Rural Dean of Ongar), and Little Bentley in Essex.

I'm sure one or the other of those is close to Dibley.

May his soul, and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.