Tag: horror

Songs on the deaths of children: where racism leads you.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Brother Martin, are you sleeping?

Today’s busker at the junction of George St and the High St was a woman playing the accordion in a series of slow waltz like tunes that were hard to identify. One sounded a bit like “Chim Chimmeny, chim chimmeny, chim, chim cheeree” as reimagined by a Klezma band from Bucharest. There was something quite mournful about the tunes, but infectious enough to walk along in a waltzy sort of way, one, two, three… one two, three. Walking any other way would have been walking against the rhythm, in the street, in my head. As it was, I was the only one in step.

When Stephen Spielberg asked John Williams to compose the music for Schindler’s List, Williams told him that to do justice to the full horror of the death camps, he’d need a really Great Composer. Spielberrg said he agreed, but, regretfully, they were all dead. Implication, you’ll have to do.

In the event, Williams did a pretty moving job, but, listening to a version of the third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony, I think he could have used that. A slow tempo, mournful version of Bruder Martin (the German version of Frere Jacques) composed as a funeral march and reflecting on the deaths of children.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the child mortality rate in Austria – where Mahler lived – ran at roughly four children out of every ten dead before they reached the age of five. Every year for a hundred years. This only started to decline at the beginning of the twentieth century; too late for Mahler, eight of whose 14 siblings died in infancy, as did his eldest daughter.

Knowing that, its hardly surprising that he wrote a song cycle called Kindertotenlieder (songs on the deaths of children).

But, all that was from natural causes, poverty, squalor. The Nazi extermination drive was to kill 1.5 million children, mostly Jewish, on an industrial scale. The local library has a Holocaust Memorial Day table with a selection of reading. It struck me that there was nothing on it by Primo Levi, whose memoire stories like Moments of Reprieve and If This is a Man are remarkable for finding fragments of humanity in the most inhumane possible circumstances which in no way diminishes the horror of it, quite the reverse.

I asked the librarian if they had any of his books. She had never heard of him and looked him up on the system. “The chemist?” having found his scientific book The Periodic Table, which he wrote after the Auschwitz books. She looked a little further and found them. I recomended that they be put on the table, and I think she was going to do it.

As I left I remarked, “you could probably do with putting a sign with the books reading ‘This is where racism leads you’.” She smiled, made moue and said “we can’t be that direct”. A pity.

Return of the Bodyless Heads?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Every year during the Autumnal years in the early sixties, when I was in my last years of Primary school, as the nights drew in and visibility declined on the playing field at the heart of the estate I grew up on, some of my friends claimed that it was haunted by bodyless heads that they had seen floating across it in the middle distance. There was much heated debate about this, with most of us quite sceptical, but the sheer vehemence of those that had “seen” was enough to bring on a wary shudder in our lizard brains – of the same sort that made us nervous of walking up the alleyway behind Cromwell Road in the dark, because the bush half way up, which we knew perfectly well was a bush, looked like a gigantic bear reaching across to grab and eat us. Some Winter evenings we got a bit of the way up, saw the bear bush, hesitated and turned back. An irrational fear that we knew was irrational, but potent nonetheless.

The bodyless heads turned out in the end to be some older kids who’d started the story as a lark, and backed it up by running across the field shining torches up into their faces, giving the impression of eery ghost lit heads floating at speed and sparking shouts of “ITS THE BODYLESS HEADS!” from the gangs of younger kids still mooching about after it was too dark to play football but too early to go home to bed and hasten the next day…and school. Even though we could see the bodies running along, dimly, somehow it was more fun to believe than not.

I was reminded of all that by these bodyless heads in the local precinct. Decapitated dummies, oddly cloned, modelling hijabs and other stylish headgear, balanced on the top of rollable purple luggage; in some ways even more eery than the original fantasy in the field. Somehere, there are complementary headless bodies…

This one looks a bit resentful that someone has taken a lump out of her nose.

Talking to my brother about this revealed an alternative origin story for the bodyless heads. Long before Halloween was a thing in England – we used to do “penny for the Guy” for Guy Fawkes night and no one had heard of Trick or Treating (or “trickle treating”, as the kids in my class used to say) – one of our more creative Primary school teachers got us to carve a Jack o Lantern. Being England in the 1960s, we didn’t have pumpkins, so I think we used Swedes. They smelt really bad anyway. They were quite small and a bit pallid looking, but we put candles in them, and I think some of my classmates might have put them on top of the fence posts at the ends of their back gardens facing onto the Field; so, from a distance in the twilight, the legend of the bodyless heads would have been born. The kids with torches would have been playing into it for a laugh.